Portugal just banned this in public spaces

It's not every day Chega gets a law through parliament, signed, and on the books. It's Thursday, 20 August. Twenty-six degrees. Air quality: 34 (Good). Here's what you need to know.

🗞️ PORTUGAL BANS FULL-FACE COVERINGS IN PUBLIC SPACES

President António José Seguro signed into law on Tuesday a decree banning the use of clothing that hides or obstructs the face in public spaces, a measure that's been called the "burqa law" since it was first proposed by the hard-right Chega, though the final text never names the burqa or niqab directly.

The bill has had a long road. Chega's André Ventura introduced it in October last year, telling parliament plainly it was meant to stop "women wearing burqas in Portugal." It passed a first, general vote that month, then sat in committee for roughly eight months while the centre-right PSD negotiated changes. Parliament finally passed the amended version in a final vote on 17 July, with PSD, Chega, the Liberal Initiative and the conservative CDS in favour, the Socialists, the smaller left-wing Livre, the Communists and Bloco de Esquerda against, and the single-member PAN, the animal-rights and environment party, abstaining. PSD's price for supporting it was reframing the bill around security and public order rather than religion, softening the language and, notably, changing its formal title away from any mention of burqas at all.

Once a bill like this reaches the president, he has three options: sign it, veto it, or send it to the Constitutional Court for a ruling on whether it's even legal. Seguro chose to sign, but not without hedging. In his note announcing the promulgation, he called it "a matter of great social and cultural sensitivity" where drawing fair lines is genuinely difficult, before adding that he was persuaded by arguments around social integration, gender equality, and rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, which he said treats an uncovered face as central to identity and to mutual recognition between citizens.

The law itself prohibits wearing clothing intended to hide or obstruct the face in public. It also makes it an offence to force someone else to cover their face because of their gender, religion, age or origin, with the last two grounds added during the legislative process. Fines run from €150 to €750 for negligent breaches and €400 to €3,000 for intentional ones. There are carve-outs for health reasons, professional or artistic activities, extreme weather, security needs, and for aircraft, diplomatic premises and places of worship.

Reaction has split along predictable lines, but not entirely. Amnesty International has called bans like this discriminatory, arguing they risk isolating the very women they claim to protect rather than freeing them. David Munir, imam of Lisbon's central mosque, told Portuguese radio station TSF he broadly agrees with the law on security grounds and pointed out that Islam doesn't actually require women to cover their faces, though he'd previously criticised the wider debate around the bill as veering into Islamophobic territory. He also noted that very few women in Portugal wear a full face veil in the first place.

For anyone in Lisbon who wears a face covering in public, for religious reasons or otherwise, the rules will apply the same way they would to anyone else, with the same exceptions around health, weather and work. The law still needs to be published in the Diário da República, the official government gazette, before it takes effect. Portugal joins France, Belgium and Denmark among the European countries with similar bans already in force, and Italy is currently weighing its own version.

Bottom line: a bill that started as an explicit target on burqas ended up as a general public-order law, and it has cleared its last political hurdle.

⚡ QUICK HITS

Pick your own driver. A new Portuguese ride-hailing app, VLOZ, is betting passengers want that instead of leaving it to an algorithm. It's been running in Lisbon, Porto and Setúbal since June, licensed by the IMT, the country's mobility and transport institute. Users can browse who's available, filter by language, and save favourites to book with again. Founder Luís Pinto says the aim is simple: give passengers more say, and give drivers a fairer shot at repeat business, in a market otherwise dominated by Uber and Bolt. It's built entirely in Portugal, based out of Torres Vedras, and still finding its feet.

Three firefighters critical after a truck overturns. Their vehicle left the road on a hard-to-reach forest track near Pedrógão, in Arouca, just before 4am, while fighting a blaze that's been burning since Monday evening. The injuries were mainly fractures, caused by the terrain's steep slopes. All four crew, including the one with lighter injuries, were taken to Santa Maria da Feira Hospital. It's one front in a bigger picture: more than 1,000 firefighters are deployed across the north this week, with Torre de Moncorvo the largest single operation at 532 personnel and 165 vehicles. Around 270 firefighters have been injured on duty nationwide since the start of the year, the head of the Portuguese firefighters' league said today, more than one a day, a toll he puts down to fires getting more aggressive each season. Lower overnight temperatures and calmer winds gave crews in Arouca some ground back, though stronger winds are forecast later today.

No more vouchers for your bottle deposits. The company behind Portugal's bottle-and-can scheme has launched an app, Volta€, that pays your 10 cents straight into your bank account. It works at the automated Volta Points set up for large events, starting with this year's Rock in Rio, and at new Volta Kiosks built to handle bigger volumes than the usual supermarket machines. Those kiosks are already running in Albufeira, Barcelos, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Funchal and Ponta Delgada, with fifty more planned across 38 municipalities. Once your balance hits €5, it transfers straight to your account.

VocaSpark — When Portuguese Grammar Finally Sticks

You have put in the hours. You have sat through the classes, filled the notebooks, maybe worked through an app or two. And still, the moment you need the right verb ending in a real conversation, it is gone. If that sounds familiar, the problem probably is not you. It is that almost nothing is built to make Portuguese grammar actually stick in an adult's head.

That is the gap Gabriel Antunes set out to close. A native tutor with a degree in Languages and Culture, he had spent years teaching Portuguese to expats and hearing the same complaint: the grammar would not stay put, no matter the effort. The flashcards that existed were made for children, or for memorising nouns, nothing for the hundreds of conjugations and the tenses that genuinely trip people up. So he built VocaSpark: physical decks that teach grammar in context through active recall, the method that actually works with how memory holds on.

Two years on, there are eight Portuguese decks covering the things that matter most, irregular verbs, the past tenses, prepositions and more, now used by over 5,000 learners across 23 countries.

Lisbon Letter readers get an exclusive 15% off the entire order with the code thelisbonletter15 at checkout.

→ Get the decks, make it stick

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is useful to you, or if you know someone whose Portuguese grammar just will not stick, every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

ALOMA (CAMPO DE OURIQUE)

Aloma is a working neighbourhood pastelaria on Rua Francisco Metrass in Campo de Ourique, the kind of place with a queue at the counter and regulars who don't need to check the case before ordering. It has won Best Pastel de Nata in Lisbon five times, most recently in 2025, and every egg tart is still opened and filled by hand, no industrial machinery involved.

But treat it as more than an egg tart stop. The counter runs to guardanapos, a folded almond pastry named for its resemblance to a napkin, bolos de arroz, and bolas de berlim, the Portuguese answer to a jam doughnut. Around the holidays, its bolo-rei has picked up a national award of its own.

It's open every day, roughly morning through early evening, though it's worth checking live hours before you go since sources vary slightly on the exact closing time. A pastel de nata runs a euro or so.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: come at a quieter hour and ask what's just come out of the oven, rather than grabbing whatever's sitting at the front of the case.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

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