Portuguese football legend, Luís Figo was in Lisbon on February 12, to launch the fifth annual Coca Cola Cup, a football tournament for children. Figo took the opportunity to confirm that he will finish his top-level career when his contract runs out at Inter Milan this summer. He ruled out a return to Portuguese football and is still considering a move to Saudi club At-Ittihad.

Facing up to the complex licensing legislation affecting holiday rental properties which, to date shows no signs of being altered, one Algarve villa rental agency has launched a service to prepare licence applications for its clients. Caspo Business, based in Praia do Carvoeiro, has chosen to remove all rental properties from its website until owners obtain the licença de utilização turística needed to make villas and apartments legal for rental to holidaymakers.

The Algarve Ecovia, a pilot cycle track project in Portugal, which will join Sagres to Vila Real de Santo António over a length of 214 kilometres, will be opened next November. Lusa visited some of the stretches of the Ecovia that are already paved and have hard shoulders and saw that many cyclists are already following the signs on the ecological track, in municipalities such as Tavira, Lagoa and Silves.

The English club will be at a training camp in the Algarve from 12th to 16th February to prepare for their meeting with Barcelona in the first knock-out round of the Champions League. The Reds will be staying for five days at Barringtons Golf & Health Spa, a tourist resort located in the Vale do Lobo area. Mentioning Liverpool’s wins in the Champions League in 2005 and the English Cup in 2006, Graham Stewart, Barringtons director-general, said that they were very excited about welcoming Liverpool.

The “chocolate of the Algarve” is the motto for the 1st Conference on Carob, which aims to promote the growing of carob and identify the fruit’s market potential. The conference will take place on 9th and 10th February at the Auditorium of the Clube de Tavira and will consist of a number of talks, ending on 10th with visits to an experimental plantation at the Centro de Experimentação de Tavira (Tavira Experimentation Centre) (Algarve Regional Agriculture Directorate) and a private carob tree plantation.

Faro Council is concerned about the possible effects on coastal erosion in the municipality of building an artificial island off the tourist resort of Vale do Lobo. In a letter to which the Lusa agency has had access, the president of the Faro Council, José Apolinário (PS) says that the construction of the island and the access tunnel could exacerbate the coastal erosion in his municipality between Ancão and the Ilha de Faro