ear Colleagues and Partners of the International Web Conference on The Legal Impacts of the COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry: As President of Escola Superior de Hotelaria e Turismo do Estoril/Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies (ESHTE), I am very honored for the contribution of our institution to this significant Conference. First of all, I want to thank our colleague Carlos Torres and all the specialists who participated in this very important work. Portugal is a country where Tourism plays a very important role, our natural and human made attractions and the way Portuguese people receive tourists, make Portugal a very interesting tourism destination. Unfortunately, is this pandemic situation, all the activities generally connected with tourism such as travelling, meeting new people and participating in a world that is not the one where you generally live, were considered enemies of the fight oh this pandemic. There was indeed a time when you could say that the aim of hospitals and public health was the opposite of the tourist activity: in tourism we need rooms and beds occupied, for hospitals it is the opposite; in tourism we need people to travel and meet other people, it was exactly what national health boards were telling us to do, it looked that, in order to fight this pandemic, we had to put tourism on hold. The consequences of COVID-19 in the Tourism activity in Portugal were huge. Many hotels and restaurants closed, airplanes were on the ground and millions of people were not working. When I am writing this text (September, 2021) many hotels are still closed, mostly the ones in the cities, and regions by the sea had a fair trade during the summer, mainly because of domestic tourism. Portuguese people have a strong tradition of trusting in vaccination, after the second week of September, Portugal was considered the country with the highest rate of complete vaccination. We hope that this achievement will contribute to the recovery of tourism in our country and that public entities will be able to promote Portugal as a safe country to go on holidays. 2019 was a great year for tourism in Portugal, if we look at data, we realize that though D
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