A year on: did Moedas deliver?

A year after Lisbon re-elected its mayor, we checked how his promises are going. It’s Tuesday, 13 October. Twenty-five degrees. Air quality: 48 (Good). Here’s what you need to know.

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MOEDAS, ONE YEAR ON: THE PROMISES AND WHAT WE CAN SHOW

A year ago yesterday, Carlos Moedas was re-elected mayor of Lisbon. His “Por ti, Lisboa” coalition of the centre-right PSD, the conservative CDS-PP and the Liberal Initiative won 41.7% of the vote and eight of the council’s 17 seats, one short of a majority. When his first budget of the new term was approved in December, he summed up its aims as more homes, more resources for street cleaning and safer streets. Here’s how those look a year in.

On housing, Moedas says the council has handed over more than 3,000 keys since he first took office in 2021, almost 600 of them in this second term. He has also promised 700 homes for young people in the historic neighbourhoods over the term, with 102 due this year, and the council says it has helped about 2,000 families pay their rent over the past five years. But the 6,765 holiday-let registrations the council struck off have mostly not come back as homes, according to the residents’ report we covered on Saturday. And on Saturday, thousands marched through the city over housing costs.

On rubbish, the big promise was general waste collection six days a week in every parish, with 300 extra street cleaners. Recruitment was under way by February, and the 2026 budget raised street-cleaning spending by about 49%, including more than 50 new collection lorries. The council also now pays parishes to clear rubbish dumped next to recycling bins, a problem it says has got worse.

Then there’s Volta, the bottle deposit scheme. In July, the council admitted that people hunting for the 10-cent returnable bottles were rummaging through bins and tipping them onto the street. In September, Moedas asked the government to “cancel immediately” the scheme, saying an environmental policy should be neither “a tax” nor “a social drama”. The Environment Minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, refused the next day, arguing the real problem is poverty, not the scheme, which is ahead of its target nationally, with 44% of plastic bottles now returned against a 40% goal. Separate holders for returnable bottles next to bins are being studied, but nothing has been decided.

The Glória funicular crash still hangs over the council. Sixteen people died on 3 September 2025, five weeks before the election. The preliminary investigation found maintenance failings and a cable that wasn’t certified for carrying passengers, and the head of Carris, the city’s transport company, resigned. The final report has been pushed back to early 2027, and both the Glória and Lavra funiculars remain closed.

The opposition’s verdict hasn’t softened. At the six-month mark, the PS, Livre and the Left Bloc accused the council of failing on housing and cleanliness, and the PS said buses had got slower and lost passengers. On the other side of the ledger, this year’s city budget also raised spending on green spaces by 64% and on safety by 57%, while keeping the city’s full refund of its share of residents’ income tax.

Bottom line: a year into his second term, Moedas can point to keys handed over and bigger budgets, while housing costs, the bin stand-off with the government and the Glória inquiry all remain unresolved.

⚡ QUICK HITS

Barack Obama told a sold-out MEO Arena that AI is moving faster than governments can keep up. Speaking at the Game Changers Forum on Saturday, his first visit to Lisbon in 16 years, the former US president said the safeguards the technology needs aren’t in place yet, and that the effort has to start in the US but needs coordination with China, which will be hard given the tensions between them. He warned that work done by lawyers, accountants and doctors will change within ten years, not thirty. He also took an indirect swipe at Donald Trump, saying a president shouldn’t start a war without provocation. Around 10,000 people gave him a standing ovation, and he met President António José Seguro at Belém during the visit.

Temperatures could reach 30°C across much of Portugal on Tuesday and Wednesday. IPMA, the national weather institute, says parts of the Alentejo and the Tagus Valley could hit 31°C to 34°C, and heatwave conditions are possible at many weather stations. Lisbon should stay milder, around 24°C to 25°C, while the coast north of Cabo da Roca may stay cooler under low cloud. The warm spell should last most of the week, with showers and thunderstorms possible from Friday or Saturday, though IPMA says that part of the forecast is still uncertain.

Company managers in Portugal declared only 5% more pay than their employees last year. Managing partners and directors declared an average of €1,879.51 a month to Social Security in 2025, just €91.26 more than salaried workers. Experts say real incomes are likely higher, because many managers take money out of their companies as dividends, which are taxed differently, or through expenses such as mileage, meals and travel. The head of the tax workers’ union, Gonçalo Rodrigues, told Expresso that underreporting isn’t limited to managers, and that the tax authority struggles to detect it.

VocaSpark - Finally, a Vocabulary Deck for European Portuguese

Most vocabulary flashcards give you a word, a translation and little else. You memorise chave = key, then hesitate the moment you need to use it: is it o or a? How does it fit into a sentence?

VocaSpark, the Portugal-based maker of physical learning tools, built its new Megadeck to fix exactly that. Aimed at beginner and elementary learners (A1 to A2), the box holds 650 essential words, organised into 15 colour-coded topics, so you can study one theme at a time or mix them. Every word comes with its article, so you pick up gender naturally rather than learning it separately. And every word comes in its own short sentence, five words or fewer, built on a core grammar structure, so vocabulary and grammar go in together:

The deck is written in European Portuguese, with Brazilian differences flagged. The cards are premium poker-size, with a wave design on the back inspired by Lisbon’s calçada pavements. At ten cards a day, it covers more than two months of study.

The Megadeck launched this month at €74.99. Lisbon Letter readers get an exclusive 15% off with the code thelisbonletter15.

→ Get the Megadeck here ←

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is useful to you, or if you know someone learning Portuguese, every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

SPACE BITES (TELHEIRAS)

You haven’t really lived in Lisbon until you’ve eaten a burger shaped like a UFO. At Space Bites in Telheiras, every burger is sealed inside a flying saucer of sweet-potato bun, and the whole place, from the decor to the menu, looks like it touched down from another galaxy. It’s run by Fátima Rafi and Golam Asshfac, who moved to Portugal from Mozambique about three years ago, where they already ran a restaurant, and decided Lisbon needed something different.

It’s not just a gimmick. Space Bites has a 4.9 rating on Google from around 470 reviews, and diners keep praising the food. Because the burgers are sealed, the sauce stays inside, which one reviewer was delighted to discover. The eight burgers’ names are all space-themed: the Galaxico is the classic, with cheese, lettuce, tomato and sauce, the BacoNova adds bacon and caramelised onion, vegans get the Veganaut, and junior astronauts get the Pluto. There’s a new burger every month, too. Burgers start at €7.50, fries and a drink add €2.50, and most people spend €10 to €15 a head, which is cheap for a trip to outer space.

Worth knowing before you go: it’s on Rua Fernando Lopes Graça and there’s a terrace. From Tuesday to Friday it closes between lunch and dinner, from 3pm to 6pm. It’s open all day at weekends and closed on Mondays.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: order the PicaX, made with grilled picanha steak and grilled pineapple. Picanha is one of the best-known dishes at the owners’ restaurant in Mozambique, and this burger is their way of bringing it to Lisbon.

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