Someone wants to buy easyJet.

Someone wants to buy easyJet. Two someones, actually. £5.7 billion, and a clock ticking down to August. It's Tuesday, 14 July. Twenty-five degrees. A World Cup semi-final tonight. Here's what you need to know.

🌬️ AIR QUALITY: 24 (Good).

🗞️ TOP STORY

EASYJET IS BEING FOUGHT OVER BY TWO US BUYERS, AND A DECISION IS DUE IN THREE WEEKS.

The airline a lot of you fly home on is in play. Castlelake, a US investment firm, spent weeks chasing easyJet, was knocked back four times, and finally got the board to agree to a £6.90-a-share deal on 5 July. Five days later, on 10 July, a bigger American buyer gatecrashed: the private-equity giant Apollo tabled £7.15 a share, worth about £5.7 billion, and easyJet's board switched sides, saying it was no longer minded to back Castlelake.

Neither offer is actually firm yet, and this is the part to hold onto. Under British takeover rules, Castlelake has until 3 August to come back with a binding bid or walk away, and Apollo has until 7 August to do the same. So the next three weeks decide it: either a firm offer lands, a counter-bid reopens the auction, or one side blinks. If a deal completes, easyJet would leave the London Stock Exchange and pass into private-equity hands.

There is one genuine obstacle that could still sink or reshape either bid. European Union (EU) law requires airlines flying routes inside the bloc to be majority-owned and controlled by Europeans. Both bidders are American, so they need a workaround. Castlelake proposed parking control with two Irish aviation executives through an EU company. Apollo says it will take whatever steps clearance requires. Until a regulator signs that off, nothing is settled, which is why easyJet's own share price is still sitting below the offer price.

For you, nothing changes today. Flights, bookings, fares and the loyalty scheme all run exactly as normal while this plays out, and both bidders have gone out of their way to say the easyJet name stays. The question is the year after. Private-equity owners tend to load a business with debt to fund the purchase, and analysts covering the deal expect the same playbook here: pressure to cut routes that only just wash their face, and fares drifting up as the new owner chases the returns. Apollo has at least said it wants to grow easyJet rather than break it up, with the holidays arm as the prize.

Bottom line: nothing to do right now, and no reason to change a summer booking. But watch the first week of August, that is when this stops being a rumour, and if your usual route to visit family or friends is a quieter one, it is worth keeping an eye on over the next year.

⚡ QUICK HITS

Portugal is reopening its Constitution, and a small party just sounded the alarm. The country's eighth constitutional revision has been grinding through a parliamentary commission since the hard-right Chega triggered it last autumn, with more than 390 proposals from all eight parties touching 186 of the 312 articles. This week Livre, one of the smaller left-wing parties, broke the quiet, calling for a narrow cross-party deal and warning it would rather see parliament dissolved than allow a sweeping rewrite. Why it matters, and why not to panic: changing the text needs a two-thirds majority the parties have the seats for but not the agreement, and the immigration rules that actually affect you, the ten-year citizenship clock and the tighter foreigners' law, were already changed by ordinary law, not this. Nothing here touches your visa. The part worth watching is the rights chapter, which currently covers foreign residents on the same footing as citizens.

Across the river, Almada's taps are running dry. The south bank has been rationing water for around ten days, with total overnight cuts in Costa da Caparica and neighbouring parishes until at least 17 July, after local consumption hit nearly double the national average during the heat. A new borehole came online Sunday and added roughly a fifth more capacity, but it is still short, a second is due at the end of the month, and full stabilisation is not expected until early 2027. If you live on the Almada side or you are heading to the Caparica beaches, fill bottles during the day and expect dry taps overnight.

Lisbon just landed on the global finance map for the first time. The city has entered Colliers' Top Global Financial Services Markets 2026, a list topped by New York, London and Singapore, flagged as a rising base for fintech, shared services and back-office finance. It is a genuine vote of confidence in the tech-and-services economy that employs a good slice of this list, even as the same pull keeps rents climbing. More international employers arriving is, on balance, more jobs and more English-speaking work going.

Sip and Speak: The Art of Complaining in Portuguese

A drink, a doll, and the most Portuguese skill there is. This Thursday.

This Thursday, Portuguese and Play turns learning the language into a night out. Sip and Speak is exactly what it sounds like: you grab a drink at the bar to loosen the nerves, get handed a gloriously petty prompt (complain to your boss about a colleague's body odour, say), then write and perform the scene with another attendee. Using puppets. Facilitators are on hand for anyone too shy to read theirs aloud, and there is no wrong way to do it, only funnier ones.

The theme is the art of complaining, which, as anyone who has queued at a Junta de Freguesia knows, is a genuine national sport. Learn to do it properly and you have unlocked half of Portuguese social life.

That absurdity is the whole method. Portuguese and Play, who host events twice a month in Lisbon (and soon hopefully in a city near you!), is built on the idea that adults take in a language faster when they stop studying and start playing, using games, puzzles and props so the words stick without feeling like a verb table. The focus is on saying what you actually mean from the very first session, which is the thing that keeps people coming back long after the apps get deleted.

Thursday, 16 July, 7pm to 9pm, at Prisma Estudio. Bar on site, non-alcoholic options too.

Lisbon Letter readers get 30% off with the code LISBONLETTER.

→ Grab a ticket for Sip and Speak

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🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

ROOFTOP TOPO (MARTIM MONIZ)

Martim Moniz is the square most visitors cross quickly on the way to somewhere prettier. Six floors up, on the roof of the scruffy shopping centre that anchors it, is one of the better rooftop bars in the city, and almost nobody photographing the castle from below knows it is there. Take the lift, not the stairs, which stop at the fourth floor and leave you stranded.

The draw is the view and the crowd. The terrace looks straight across the rooftops to the Castelo de São Jorge, the drinks are properly made, with a whiskey sour that has a following and an India Pale Ale (IPA) on tap, and there is a wall of free vintage arcade games for when the conversation flags. It is part rooftop bar, part kitchen, so you can come for one cocktail or settle in for petiscos and a proper plate of something.

Cocktails run about €10, with a short food menu if you want more than a snack. The honest notes are the terrace fills fast on a warm evening, so come early or be ready to hover, and the lift can test your patience on a Friday night.

→ A rooftop the tourists miss, right over the square. Find them here ←

On the sixth floor of the Centro Comercial Martim Moniz, on the square itself.

Insider tip: it is two minutes from Prisma Estudio on Rua da Palma, which makes it the obvious spot for dinner or a drink before Portuguese and Play's Sip and Speak on Thursday. Get there before sunset for a terrace table, order the whiskey sour, and if you fancy a go on the machines, put the drink down somewhere else first. They're funny about that.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

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