Everyone's saying cabin bags are now free. They're not.

Everyone is saying the EU just made cabin bags free. It didn't. Thirteen years of negotiation. A final vote on Monday. And a change that is smaller than the headlines suggest but more useful than it sounds. It's Thursday, 16 July. Twenty-seven degrees. Spain are in Sunday's World Cup final. Here's what you need to know.

🌬️ AIR QUALITY: 24 (Good).

🗞️ TOP STORY

THE EU JUST SETTLED THE HAND LUGGAGE FIGHT. READ THE SMALL PRINT BEFORE YOU CELEBRATE.

On Monday the Council of the European Union gave final clearance to the first overhaul of air passenger rights since 2004. Parliament had passed it on 7 July by 646 votes to 12. That ends a fight that started in 2013 and stalled for more than a decade, and the headlines have mostly settled on one line: the EU has made cabin bags free. That is not quite what happened.

What did happen is subtler and arguably more useful. From now on the fare an airline shows you must already include an allowance for a piece of hand baggage, before you start booking, so you can actually compare one carrier against another. The €19.99 that then becomes €58 by the payment screen is finished. But airlines are still allowed to offer you a cheaper fare if you volunteer to travel without the bag, which means the overhead trolley has not been made free. It has been made visible. The idea of guaranteeing free cabin baggage across every airline was on the table for years and fell away in the final stretch.

Deco, Portugal's consumer association, has been blunt about the gap. It calls the deal a win overall, but says the reform still fails to recognise what it considers a basic right, that a passenger can carry a personal item and a reasonably sized cabin bag at no cost whatsoever. It also warns the text leaves room to confuse the small bag under the seat in front with the wheeled case in the locker above, which is precisely the ambiguity budget airlines have monetised for fifteen years.

The wins are real elsewhere, and several are worth knowing now. Compensation survived intact, which was the whole fight: €250 for flights up to 1,500km, €400 for longer journeys inside the EU, €600 for the rest, still triggered at a three-hour delay. Airlines had lobbied hard to push that trigger out to as much as nine hours and lost. "No-show" clauses are banned, so an airline can no longer stop you boarding your return leg because you skipped the outbound. Charges for seat selection on bookings that include children are gone, as are fees for correcting a misspelled name. You get nine months to claim, and the airline has thirty days to pay or explain why not. You can leave the aircraft during long waits on the tarmac.

The catch for this summer is timing. The rules enter into force twelve months and twenty days after they are published in the Official Journal, which puts them somewhere around mid-2027. Nothing changes on your August flight. The existing rules, the ones that already give you €250 to €600 for a three-hour delay, are what apply for now, and Portugal's aviation regulator is where a complaint goes if a carrier ignores them.

Bottom line: your cabin bag did not become free this week. The price of it stopped being hidden, which is a smaller win than the headlines suggest and a slightly bigger one than it sounds, but you will not feel it until next summer.

⚡ QUICK HITS

A report published this week says Portugal's civic space is shrinking. The Civic Space Report 2026, produced by the European Civic Forum with the Portugal chapter written by the group Academia Cidadã, was launched in Lisbon on Wednesday. Portugal keeps its "open" rating, one of only 12 of the 34 European countries assessed, in a year when France, Germany and Italy were all downgraded to "narrowed". But it records a substantial deterioration through 2025: xenophobic narratives against immigrants becoming normalised and feeding a rise in hate crimes, freedom of association squeezed by restrictive migration and nationality reforms and by administrative dysfunction, and property speculation pushing community organisations out of their buildings. It also calls for scrutiny of neo-Nazi elements within the security forces, which it describes as a serious threat to the rule of law.

Only one country in the European Union taxes your shopping more than Portugal. A European Commission report published this week puts Portugal's standard rate of value added tax (VAT) at 23%, the second highest in the bloc and beaten only by Hungary on 27%. It applies to most of what you buy that is not food, books or medicine, and it is the reason a pint of Portuguese craft beer costs what it does: brewers point out that 23% of every bottle they sell goes straight to the state.

Exam results land tomorrow, and some students think their answers are missing. The education ministry has confirmed that quality checks on this year's national exam scanning found answer sheets poorly digitised because of folds, continuation pages that were never scanned at all, and papers that were not handed to the security forces for transport to the state printing house at the first attempt. Allegedly a teachers' group says it has a dated record of a supervisor telling a marker to grade with whatever they had if the missing page did not arrive in time, an instruction the exam body denies issuing. First-phase results are posted on 17 July. The second phase starts on 20 July.

The Block Lisboa: The City's Original Crypto and Web3 Home

Since 2017, the room where Lisbon's Web3 crowd actually meets. Every Friday, and most of the week besides.

If you have ever wanted to understand what half of Lisbon means by Web3 without being sold a coin, this is the room to do it in. The Block Lisboa has been the city's crypto and Web3 hub since 2017, back when it was a fringe interest rather than a fixture of every co-working kitchen. It now runs more than 6,500 members and an event most weeks.

CryptoFriday is the weekly fixture, an open meetup for anyone from the merely curious to the full-time builder. Alongside it run Block Sessions, community-led talks that dig into Web3, artificial intelligence (AI), decentralised finance (DeFi) and whatever is coming next, led by people doing the work rather than selling a course.

There is also a co-working space for the freelancers, founders and remote workers who live in this world and would rather not do it alone from the kitchen table. And the calendar has weight: this month The Block is hosting a side event for the ETHGlobal Lisbon crowd on 24 July, already fully booked.

You will find it at Rua Latino Coelho 63, first floor, in Picoas.

→ See what's on at The Block Lisboa

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is your scene, or you know someone still looking for their people in Lisbon's tech world, every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

FÁBRICA OITAVA COLINA (CABO RUIVO)

In the seventeenth century, a friar called Nicolau de Oliveira declared Lisbon the city of seven hills. He knew it was wrong. Seen from the river, the Castelo de São Jorge blocks the view of the Graça hill, so seven is what you count, and seven is what Rome had. He left the eighth one out on purpose so the comparison would land. A brewery founded in Graça in 2014 took the slight personally and named itself after the hill nobody counted.

Oitava Colina outgrew Graça and moved its fermenters to a warehouse in Cabo Ruivo, and the taproom it built there is the reason to make the trip. Ten taps sit a few metres from the tanks that filled them, which is about as short as the journey from brewing tank to glass gets in this city. The beer is malt, water, hops and yeast, unpasteurised and without artificial preservatives, which is also why it does not sit around. The regular line-up runs to six, with names like Urraca and Joe da Silva, and the board rotates constantly around them. Food is pizza and whatever pop-up kitchen is in residence.

The building itself is the fun part. It is tucked behind other warehouses off Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, with no reason for you to be there unless you’re looking, and seating spread across the warehouse floor, a terrace, and a balcony perched on top of a shipping container with the Tejo in front of it.

The honest notes: it usually opens Thursday to Saturday evenings only, though summer hours shift, so check their socials before you set off. It is genuinely hard to find the first time. And it is a working brewery, so the room concrete and loud and when it fills up.

→ Ten taps, a few metres from the tanks. Find them here ←

Insider tip: Rather than ordering by your usual style, ask which tank went on most recently. The answer could change your order, and they will tell you straight.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

Reach Lisbon's English-speaking community, every morning. Advertise with the Lisbon Letter.