Time in Lisbon

Portugal and Spain share a peninsula but not a clock. Lisbon follows the Greenwich-based zone that its longitude, about 9° west, suggests, while Spain adopted Central European Time in 1940. Crossing the border on the road from Badajoz to Elvas, you set your watch back one hour.

Portugal has tried Central European Time twice. From 1966 to 1976 it stayed on UTC+1 all year, and from 1992 to 1996 it switched to CET with summer time at UTC+2, aligning with Brussels and Madrid. Both experiments ended because winter mornings were dark until well after 8:30 AM. Since October 1996 the mainland and Madeira have used WET, while the Azores keep their own zone one hour behind Lisbon.

Clocks change on the European Union schedule: forward at 1:00 AM on the last Sunday of March and back at 2:00 AM on the last Sunday of October, on the same instant as London, Berlin and Athens.

Because the city sits so far west within its zone, evenings are long. Around the June solstice the sun rises near 6:12 AM and sets close to 9:05 PM, about 14 hours 53 minutes of daylight. In late December sunrise slips to about 7:51 AM and sunset comes around 5:18 PM, a day of roughly 9 hours 27 minutes, still more than an hour longer than in London.

Offices usually work 9:00 to 18:00 with a long lunch, and many shops stay open until 19:00 or later. Euronext Lisbon trades from 8:00 to 16:30 local time, the same session Paris and Amsterdam run from 9:00 to 17:30 on their clock. Lisbon is normally five hours ahead of New York, so 9:00 AM in New York is 2:00 PM in Lisbon; for one week in late October to early November and three weeks in March the gap shrinks to four hours. Lisbon and London always show the same time. For any other pairing, try the time zone converter.