Portugal – The News Desk

One year of Cristiano Ronaldo in Saudi Arabia

31Dec

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Sports

One year of Cristiano Ronaldo in Saudi Arabia

It was one of those rare days when nothing comes off for Cristiano Ronaldo and he cannot conceal his rising frustration.An offside flag denied him a goal and a VAR intervention denied him a penalty before he sent a wild shot and two headers off target in the closing stages of a crucial game. At one stage, he wrestled an opponent to the ground and was perhaps lucky to avoid a red card. As the game slipped away, he kept grimacing, looking to the heavens in disgust, as if to ask what he had done to deserve this.It was another blow for Al Nassr’s Saudi Pro League title hopes and, walking off the pitch at the final whistle, Ronaldo heard mocking chants from the jubilant Al Hilal supporters. “Messi, Messi,” they shouted, trying to taunt him with the name of his great rival.Grinning, he twice gr...

Lisbon’s Mayor Pleads For Moderation Amid Far-Right Surge

9Dec

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Politics

Lisbon’s Mayor Pleads For Moderation Amid Far-Right Surge

LISBON, Portugal — On a warm evening when the croons of a fado singer in a dark bar where fingers slicked with oil glide between dishes of olives and wineglass stems echo down ancient limestone streets filled with late-night revelers from all over the world, it’s easy to forget that this ancient capital is in a political crisis.Unlike in London, Amsterdam or Paris, Lisbon’s nearly 3,000-year evolution into a modern hub of cosmopolitan locals and international visitors came without a backlash in the form of far-right populists blaming foreigners and minorities for the problems in the city. Voters here had steered clear of politicians who harkened to the dictatorship that ruled Portugal from the Great Depression until the 1970s.That is, until now. The wave of right-wing populism sweeping Eu...

European Developers Are Wooing Wine Lovers With Their Own Hassle-Free Vineyards

6Dec

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World

European Developers Are Wooing Wine Lovers With Their Own Hassle-Free Vineyards

With careers in Northern California’s tech sector and a primary home on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, Clifton Lewis Lyles and his wife, Serene Lewis Lyles, have long spent their down time among the vineyards and wineries of Sonoma and Napa counties. Now in their early 50s, the two are getting ready for something new—their own bit of vineyard and their own private wine label, some 5,500 miles away in the Alentejo region of Portugal. The opportunity comes with their new vacation home: a two-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot villa, currently under construction, in L’and Vineyards, a luxury development about an hour’s drive from Lisbon. The 163-acre estate, with 15 acres of vineyards, lets its homeowners—spread across a total of about 80 units in the coming years—become de facto wine...

Ronaldo hit with $1 billion class-action lawsuit for endorsing Binance NFTs

1Dec

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Money

Ronaldo hit with $1 billion class-action lawsuit for endorsing Binance NFTs

Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is facing a class-action lawsuit seeking at least $1 billion in damages for his role in promoting cryptocurrency-related "non-fungible tokens," or NFTs, issued by the beleaguered cryptocurrency exchange Binance to millions of his fans.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida Monday, alleges that Ronaldo's promotion of Binance was "deceptive and unlawful." Binance's partnership with high-profile figures like Ronaldo, the plaintiffs claim, led them into costly and unsafe investments.Under the marketing partnership, Ronaldo encouraged millions of his fans and supporters to invest with Binance, even though many of them were unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies or the platform, the lawsuit alleges. As a result of his endorseme...

Portugal’s Political Chaos Could Be Big For Nuclear Energy

22Nov

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Politics

Portugal’s Political Chaos Could Be Big For Nuclear Energy

LISBON, Portugal ― After nearly five hours in a stuffy, cream-walled classroom on the second floor of a college physics department last Tuesday night, Luis Guimarãis stood up and broached the metaphysical: Can something die that was never born?The audience of nearly two dozen students had been sitting in the fluorescent-lit room, which featured a tragically inactive espresso machine, since the middle of the afternoon. The sky had gone dark hours earlier, and most of the University of Lisbon’s students had dispersed to neighborhood bars. But the youths and professors staring at a projector screen at the front of the room listened intently to a lineup of speakers attempting to recruit them to what has seemed, for decades, like an impossible cause in this nation: building a nuclear reactor.J...

How they carved SC Braga’s stadium into a granite hillside

26Oct

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Sports

How they carved SC Braga’s stadium into a granite hillside

The most significant of Braga’s many hilltops is the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and place of pilgrimage for Christians who climb the white and gold zig-zag staircase to its doors.Six kilometres west, planted upon Monte do Castro as if a piece of Lego, sits another monument that is both incongruous yet completely natural in a way that suggests the divine played a part here too.But SC Braga’s Municipal Stadium was designed, engineered and built by man — and on Tuesday, it will host one of the greatest club sides in the world, Real Madrid.Braga will become the 152nd different club Real have played in 68 years of continental football, but never will the 14-time European champions have played at a stadium with a backdrop quite like this.At the end of the spiralling ro...

24Aug

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Travel

In Portugal, a Former Royal Home Opens as a Hotel

A decade ago, the Spanish landscape designer Fernando Caruncho began working on a project that would link the private walled gardens of several aristocratic estates in the Portuguese village of Santar, in the Dão wine region. Now, visitors will have a new way to access the 50-acre parkland: One of the ancestral manor homes within Caruncho’s greenscape has been converted into a small hotel. Formerly known as Casa das Fidalgas and owned by the House of Bragança, who ruled Portugal from 1640 to 1910, when the monarchy was overthrown, Valverde Santar Hotel & Spa served as a residence for the Bragança family until 2019. The Porto-based design firm Atelier Bastir carried out a restoration of the residence, preserving original details — including pitched, wood-paneled ceilings, 18th-century ...