Responding to the many and varied promotional messages in the past year, e.g., that the Algarve is the best place for the Spanish to come for their holidays, thousands of them duly turned up for their Easter breaks.
Often after hours of travel through Spain, the Algarve finally was in sight, as was the sign telling all foreigners to pull over, thus delaying journeys for those who were quite happy to use the EN125.
A four-bedroom house of 141 m2 in Spain has been raffled off to a winner who paid just €10 for a ticket.
The house in Segorbe, a town of 9,300 near Valencia, was inherited two years earlier by the Bolumar family who tried but failed to sell it through agents for €90,000.
More than half of Portugal’s restaurants and hotels still are at a “high risk of failure,” according to a report by the European Commission.
According to Pedro Carvalho from Portugal’s association for hoteliers and restaurateurs, the blame lies fair and square with the high tax increase that his members were subject to after the Troika arrived in the country and IVA for meals shot up from 12% to 23%.
Socialist MPs from a parliamentary health committee investigating the Algarve’s health service are “deeply concerned” at the deteriorating situation despite regional management’s claims that all is well.
The committee members spent two days visiting various of the Algarve’s health departments, meeting doctors, nurses and managers and concluded that generally things were worse than in 2011.
Expat tax affairs will be opened to greater scrutiny when 93 governments begin exchanging information about bank accounts.
New regulations mean that within two years, tax authorities will automatically exchange information on everyone irrespective of whether tax has been paid or not.
The lineup to buy Novo Banco is shrinking further as the People's Bank of China will no longer be bidding, nor will Spain’s Banco Popular
Of the seven candidates who made non-binding bids for the purchase of Novo Banco, there are five left to enter the next stage which involves making sealed bids for the bank which arose from the wreckage of BES last August.
The UK is to witness the closing down of 216 out-of-town supermarkets and DIY stores.
In addition, plans for about 100 new store developments have been scrapped.
Portugal's Ministry of Agriculture is waiting for the European authorities to decide on the safety of glyphosate, the herbicide widely used in Portugal and which has been classified as potentially carcinogenic by the World Health Organization.
The ministry also has suggested that the conclusions of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that recently rated Roundup, as "possibly or probably" carcinogenic to humans, may have been hasty.
