Passengers hoping to fly on Ryanair in Europe this winter can expect dramatically cheaper fares.

The carrier has revealed that winter prices are to be cut.

Germany is being taken to the European Court of Justice over alleged contraventions of water pollution laws in some of its agricultural practices.

The suit, filed by the European Commission last week, holds that Germany failed to control the use of nitrate in farming when German official data in 2012 revealed that too high a level of the chemical had entered its ground water, according to a report by German public broadcaster WDR.

Faro council’s plans for major alterations to the city’s eastern and western approaches may have been blocked by the government but the greening of the regional capital’s streets and squares is going ahead with 412 new trees to be planted by the year end.

The €26,000 spend to improve the environment and the quality of those living in and visiting the city began last week with crews removing old tree stumps and digging out damaged trees to be replaced with carefully selected specimens.

A visitor from Brazil has damaged a statue of St. Gabriel as he tried to photograph the C18th masterpiece in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon late on Sunday morning.

The treasured statue in gilded wood sat on a pedestal and had a protective barrier but this did not deter the visitor on 'free entry day' who managed to dislodge St Gabriel’s likeness, sending it crashing to the floor.

The GNR has seized more than 75,000 cigarettes and nabbed four people on suspicion of involvement in a cigarette smuggling network which has deprived the Portuguese Treasury of an estimated €680,000.

The police operation took place in the Setúbal and Faro as ten houses were raided as a result of a year’s investigation into a smuggling operation with its roots in Eastern Europe.

The Algarve mayors’ group, AMAL, has decided the best thing for the region’s abandoned cats and dogs is to create two super-kennels, one east and one west, paid for by all the councils.

The government’s new animal welfare laws decree that each council area must have a municipal kennel and vet and imposes strict rules that will decrease dramatically the current number of dogs put down each year in Portugal, an estimated 100,000.

Early morning walkers have been alerted to the possibility of finding more consignments of hashish washed up on beaches in the central Algarve.

The GNR already has collected more than 100 kilos between last Thursday and Saturday.

The long-awaited solution to prevent future flooding in Albufeira's downtown area has been announced a year after the November 1st 2015 deluge caused €25 million of damage to the city’s downtown area: a tunnel.

This underground structure will serve to divert the flow of Albufeira’s seasonal river away from the town into the sea as part of series of measures that will take well over a decade to complete and remain uncosted.