Normal service will be resumed on Monday

There'll be no bank robberies today – but only because the banks are closed for a holiday. Instead today is a feriado, a Bank holiday, in this case for the Catholic holiday of Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was transported into Heaven with her body and soul united. However, for many Portuguese it'll just be another long weekend and they'll be turning to their other great passion: killing each other on the roads.

Portuguese driving is notoriously bad, so much so that even French drivers have a good reputation. Since the holiday season started in the middle of July there have been over 2.000 accidents, 60 deaths and over 300 serious injuries. In the weekend of 1st August there were 16 deaths, and last weekend alone 20 people were killed in a 24h period.

For a London driver, rarely able to get above 30mph most of the time, this need for speed is baffling. Portuguese drivers, mainly in black or silver Seat's or in expensive Audi’s or Mercede’s, will rocket past our little Modus, sometimes forcing cars coming in the other direction to move to the side of the road. Often speeding drivers will be in commercial vehicles, easy to spot as all company vehicles are two seater's with a metal grill behind the front seats, or in company vans. Because the drivers don't own these cars, they'll drive like Tiago Monteiro around the Portuguese roads. In the Aveiro/Oiã area there are vehicles from two companies that we are always wary of: Würth (who co-incidentally sponsor Formula 1) and Centroauto. When we see these on the road we always get ready to move out of the way.

The GNR do what they can, of course. There is a road safety campaign operating at the moment, to get people to drive slower, and the TV news reports the statistics each day as they show images of crushed and mangled cars. The worst thing is to see images of the bombeiros hosing down big pools of blood on the road, but it hardly seems to have any effect.

Mind you, bad driving is not limited to the daytime. Since today is a holiday, last night the bars will have been full of people drinking and getting in the mood for their long weekend. After necking umpteen beers, or whiskies, they'll think nothing of getting in their car and driving home - or to a club. At night the police set up checkpoints and give people random breath tests. Over the holiday season they adopt a zero tolerance policy to drink-driving, in an attempt to demonstrate it's a stupid thing to do, but driving while intoxicated seems a difficult habit to break in Portugal.

So if you’re going away this weekend, take care on the roads, enjoy the beach, and bom fim-de-semana.

Technorati Tags: driving,portugal,holiday,feriado,assumption,bank,robbery,safey,roads,drink

Another day, another hold up

A day can't go by without mentioning a bank robbery in Portugal. After last weeks hostage situation, and yesterday's attempted robbery of a Millennium in Loures comes news of yet another bank hold-up in Lisbon.

This time, a branch of the Banco Popular was the target, when a 50 year-old man wearing a wig held up the staff with a gun. The man fled the bank on foot, and the police have yet to reveal how much was stolen.

This robbery comes on the same day that the Diário Económico reported that in the first SIX MONTHS of 2008 there has been a bank robbery, or an attempted robbery, once every 40 hours in Portugal, with a haul of approximately 439.000€.

Topping the list of banks targetted was Millennium bcp, with 15 robberies, followed by the Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) with 13 and Montepio with 12. Santander, which was fourth on the list, with 8 robberies, actually lost the most money, with a total of 86.000€, while CGD lost 66.000€ the banks Funchal and BANIF lost 48.000€. Aside from the hostage situation last week, BES actually had the least number of branches robbed.

With aprroximately four robberies per week, the survey identified, unsurprisingly, that Lisbon was the city most at risk, followed by Porto in the north and Sétubal in the south. On average, the haul from each robbery was 4.400€.

One thief that won't be contributing to the figures for the rest of the year was Jaime Jímenez Arbe, 51, the robber known as ‘El solitário’, who was caught by police last week after robbing 26 banks.

The daily free sheet Destak compared the figures in Portugal with those in Brazil and the US. With a population of about 10million, if the numbers of robberies continue at their present rate, there will be 100 robberies by the end of the year. By contrast, with a population of 180million there were 529 robberies in 2007, and in the US over 10,000 robberies. On the other hand, Portugal can't compare with Baghdad, officially the bank robbery capital of the world, where approximately $1million a month is stolen.

While the police are chasing bank robbers, the funeral of Paulo Salazar, the 13 year-old killed in the foiled warehouse robbery on Monday, will take place tomorrow. Although family will be there, and no doubt a completment of GNR keeping an eye on the service, one person who won't be is the father of the boy, who hasn't been seen since being driven away from court yesterday. Odds are he won't turn up for his court date, either.

Marcas Technorati: robbery,bank,portugal,milllennium,banco popular,lisbon,porto sétubal,record