This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Portugal — covering progress in areas such as clean energy, public health, social policy, and environmental stewardship. Each entry highlights real developments and the people behind them.
Employers now face penalties for contacting workers outside of office hours. Companies will also have to help pay for expenses incurred by remote working.
The world’s largest mobility platform pledged to clean up its act in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid and Paris in response to the #TrueCostOfUber campaign, which urged it to ditch dirty vehicles and replace them with electric cars.
Young activists from Portugal have filed the first climate change case at the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, demanding 33 countries make more ambitious emissions cuts to safeguard their future physical and mental well-being.
Portuguese energy utility EDP has announced the closure of its Sines coal power plant, bringing forward the planned shutdown of coal-fired power plants in the country by two years, from 2023 to 2021.
The plant could start producing “green” hydrogen, a cleaner energy source than fossil fuels, by 2023 via electrolysis – a process using electricity to split water – and the aim is for one gigawatt by 2030.
Portugal has temporarily given all migrants and asylum seekers full citizenship rights, granting them full access to the country’s healthcare until at least June 30.
Renewable energy accounted for 103.6% of Portugal’s electricity consumption last month.
Macau’s handover at midnight on December 20, 1999 closed 442 years of Portuguese presence in the city and, with it, the last European colony in Asia. The transfer came not through conflict but through twelve years of patient negotiation between Lisbon and Beijing. It was the quiet final chapter of an empire that began in 1415.
Brazil’s independence began on 7 September 1822, when Prince Pedro stood beside the Ipiranga brook near São Paulo, tore the Portuguese insignia from his uniform, and cried “Independence or death.” Portugal formally recognized the new empire three years later. The moment set Brazil on a rare path — a single vast state, rather than a patchwork of republics, in South America.
Vasco da Gama’s fleet sighted the Seychelles on 15 March 1503, when scrivener Thomé Lopes logged a rugged volcanic island rising from the Indian Ocean — almost certainly Silhouette. No one went ashore, and the archipelago stayed uninhabited for another 267 years. It was a small notation that quietly pulled the islands into the world’s maps.
