Edu Blanco, CEO of Santana Motors, will present the Cajal, the brand's first all-terrain vehicle since the Linares factory closed in 2011, at an official event in Linares on 15 July 2026, with commercial sales following in the second half of the year. The Cajal is a body-on-frame, permanent-4WD off-road SUV assembled in Linares from kits supplied by BAIC Group, the Chinese manufacturer whose BJ40 platform underpins the model. The vehicle measures 4.7 metres in length and seat

The email went out on a Tuesday in early August. A software sales director from a Nordic firm, three weeks into a new Iberian territory, had a warm lead in Madrid, a head of operations who had taken a call in June and expressed genuine interest. The follow-up was professionally worded, referenced the earlier conversation, and asked for thirty minutes in the first week of August. Then another, shorter note went out the following Thursday. Neither was answered. When September a

Riyadh Air will operate three weekly direct flights between Málaga, Costa del Sol Airport and Riyadh from 14 July 2026, making Spain the only country in its entire launch network to hold two simultaneous destinations, with a Madrid service following three days later on 17 July. The carrier is Saudi Arabia's second flag carrier, wholly owned by the sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF) and launched in March 2023. It operates Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft configured across

Gotion High-Tech and Spain's Ministry of Industry have officially confirmed a €950 million investment to construct two battery facilities on a 12-hectare industrial site in Valladolid. The Chinese battery manufacturer will build a cathode active materials plant and a battery recycling plant, with construction starting in 2027. The Spanish government will contribute €138 million in grants under the PERTE VEC programme, €46 million more than the provisional figure reported in M

Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN) has signed a contract with the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) to assume executive direction of the MIT Portugal Programme until 2030, sharing national coordination with the University of Minho. The annual budget for the role stands at approximately €500,000. The appointment marks the first time the programme's administrative centre of gravity has moved to Coimbra. Instituto Superior Técnico held the coordination through Phases I and II

Lufthansa Technik broke ground on 29 June 2026 on a 55,000-square-metre MRO facility in Santa Maria da Feira, south of Porto, in a €309 million investment that the Portuguese government has classified as a Projeto de Interesse Nacional, a designation that accelerated land-use approvals and unlocked a €223 million AICEP incentive package signed at the same ceremony. The facility, wholly owned by Lufthansa Technik Portugal, will repair engine parts and aircraft components for a

The sales director flew in from Amsterdam on a Tuesday. By Thursday he had the product demo done, the pricing deck approved, and the WhatsApp group with the procurement lead active. He flew home on Friday and sent a follow-up email that afternoon. Another on Monday. A call request on Wednesday. By the end of the following week, the Spanish prospect had stopped responding entirely. The deal did not stall. It ended. And the sales director spent the next quarter trying to unders

Air Europa launched its first direct service between Johannesburg and Madrid on 24 June 2026, operating three weekly flights using Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft and providing more than 92,000 seats annually on a corridor that previously required a connection through London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Paris. Spain's third-largest airline, headquartered in Mallorca and operating its long-haul network through Madrid, Barajas, competes on the Johannesburg, European hub corridor wi

Rui Alves, CEO of InvoiceXpress, has launched an AI-powered invoicing integration built on Anthropic's Claude platform, allowing Portuguese businesses to issue invoices, record receipts, query overdue documents, analyse billing data, and update client records through natural language commands, with no programming required. The integration uses Model Context Protocol (MCP), an architecture that acts as a secure bridge between AI platforms and external software. Until now, conn

Promptly Health, the Porto-founded federated health-data company, has integrated Hapvida NotreDame Intermédica into its network, adding 16 million Brazilian beneficiaries and bringing the total population covered by its platform to more than 70 million people across Europe and Brazil. The deal was confirmed on 25 June 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed. Hapvida joins without upfront capital investment, as Promptly's network model allows data partners to onboard at zero

The European Investment Bank has signed an advisory agreement with Resonac Graphite Spain to support the company's project to produce synthetic graphite for electric vehicle batteries at its site in A Coruña. The engagement was formalised in late June 2026 and marks the most tangible signal yet that the company is positioning for a grant application under the EU Innovation Fund. César Castiñeira Díaz, President and CEO of the Resonac Graphite Business Unit and President of Re

FastFiber and Vauban Infrastructure Partners have both entered the binding offer phase to acquire 100% of DSTelecom, Portugal's largest wholesale telecommunications operator, with at least two candidates currently undergoing due diligence. The sale covers the entirety of DSTelecom. Cube Infrastructure Fund II, which acquired 54% of DSTelecom in 2018, is selling its stake after roughly eight years. The Braga-based DST Group, led by the Gonçalves Teixeira family and holding the

Juan José Marcos, CEO of Barcelona-based Ingedetec, has opened a technical office in Tangier, Morocco, committing €230,000 to the operation. Of that total, €80,000 came from an ACCIÓ grant disbursed under Catalonia's Multilocation: New Foreign Subsidiaries programme. Ingedetec sells engineering design and development services, electrical architecture, lighting, battery systems, bumpers, and interior and exterior vehicle components, to automotive, railway, and aeronautical man

TikTok Shop went live in Portugal on 15 June 2026, giving Portuguese users the ability to discover, buy, and pay for products inside the app through short videos, live streams, and creator storefronts, without being redirected to an external retailer. The launch extends ByteDance's European social commerce rollout, which reached Spain and Ireland in 2024 and France, Germany, and Italy in March 2025. Portugal was not part of the initial continental wave but has now joined a fo

The Swedish founder put his phone on the table within thirty seconds of sitting down. Not to take a call. Not to check the time. He opened the app, tapped twice, and sent a digital contact card to the director across from him before the coffee had been poured. It was efficient, considered, even a little elegant. The director accepted it without comment, set his own phone face-down, and spent the rest of the lunch being entirely pleasant and entirely unreachable. The follow-up

Atland Voisin has acquired four senior residences in Braga, Santarém, Leiria, and Coimbra for approximately €20 million, structured as a sale and leaseback across two of its managed funds. The deal marks Portugal's first named entry onto the French SCPI map. By Q1 2025, domestic investment represented only around 20% of SCPI acquisitions across the sector, and last year French SCPI funds allocated nearly €2.3 billion across Europe excluding France, with Spain as a leading tar

Joan Vendrell, co-founder and CEO of NeuralTrust, has closed a $20 million seed round to build the control layer that tells enterprises what their AI agents are actually doing. The round was led by Munich-based Alstin Capital, whose Alstin III fund raised €175 million in 2024 and typically writes tickets between €2 million and €7 million at seed. NeuralTrust received a cheque several multiples above that range. Co-investors include VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc S

Carlos Inácio, Managing Director of Primark Iberia, disclosed at the ExpoRetail Iberoamérica trade fair in Madrid on 18 June 2026 that the Irish retailer has invested €225 million in Spain over the past three fiscal years, opening 20 new stores and fully renovating 26 existing locations across the country. The figure is the cumulative total of a multi-tranche programme that began when Primark committed €100 million to Spain in 2022, covering eight new stores and a package of

Perfumerías Primor, a Spanish family retailer operating more than 150 stores across Spain and Portugal and an e-commerce platform that draws over 17 million users, has signed a €3 million letter of intent to distribute Korean beauty products, the largest single outcome from the K-Expo trade consultation event held in Madrid on 12 and 13 June 2026. The LOI gives Korean beauty brands immediate access to Spain's largest value-positioned beauty retail network at a single stroke,

Spain's Interior Ministry has activated the mandatory compliance deadline for its digital national identity system. From 2 April 2026, every public administration and private-sector entity operating in Spain is legally required to accept the MiDNI mobile application as a valid form of identification, carrying equal legal weight to the physical DNI card. The legal foundation is Real Decreto 255/2025, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 1 April 2025. That decree, the