Where the data comes from and how it is checked

Where we get the facts

We read each organisation’s website, or its Facebook or Instagram page when it has no website, and note what it says itself about its offer for children: ages, weekly timetable, prices with their unit, languages, trial classes and whether a parent has to stay.

The address, the point on the map and the opening hours may also come from the organisation’s Google Maps listing. For sports clubs, membership of a federation may come from the club list that the federation itself publishes.

Every fact is stored with the page address, the date it was read and a short quote in the original language. Directories, news articles, booking platforms and reviews never count as sources.

Source marks

Every source carries one of three marks: published by the organisation (its website or social media page), Google listing (its Google Maps entry) and federation list (the clubs affiliated to a sports federation).

On the organisation’s page the mark and the date go with each fact, so you can see at once where it came from and how fresh it is.

Unpublished facts

When the pages we read do not give a fact, the organisation’s page says it is not published and the table shows a dash. «Not published» describes our sources, not the organisation.

No gap is filled by guesswork, and school years are not turned into ages. Prices keep the unit the organisation uses; the only sum done here is the per-class price marked ≈, a package or course divided by its number of classes.

Class times and opening hours

The table has two columns of hours. Class times: the days and hours of a class, an ATL afternoon or a camp day, as the organisation publishes them. Opening hours: when the site is open, often from its Google listing.

A site can be open at an hour when no class runs for your child’s age. A row with opening hours alone sits below the dividing line, under a heading that says so.

The after-school pages use weekdays from 15:30 to 19:00. A class qualifies when a group starts inside that window; an ATL qualifies when its hours, extended time included, cover the whole window.

What we do not judge

No organisation, teacher, coach or programme is given a mark, a score or a place in a ranking.
We do not visit organisations; each fact comes from a published source.
The quality of teaching, coaching or care is not judged here.
We do not know whether a class has a free place; ask the organisation.
Prices appear as published, with their unit and date, and are not confirmed with the organisation.

Right of reply

If you run an organisation on the list and a fact is wrong, incomplete or out of date, fill in the change form with a link to the page showing the right fact.

A correction backed by the organisation’s own pages goes into the next update and is entered in the update log. An organisation that closes keeps a page marked as closed and drops out of every table.

An organisation can also ask to leave the list: choose «Ask for an organisation to be removed» in the change form and leave a contact showing that you run it. The organisation, its page and its rows in the data files are gone within a month.

Dates and updates

Each organisation’s sources are read again at least every 6 months. A price published for a period that has ended stays on the organisation’s page with that period shown; filters and the summary line leave it out.

How the site is funded

No organisation pays to be listed, and no payment changes a row or its position, which follows the same rules for every organisation, set out in the key to each table.

An organisation’s page may carry a link to Zartrace, a service affiliated with this site, always labelled as such. Clicks on contact buttons are counted as totals only, with no personal data.

Open data

The whole list can be downloaded as JSON, one record per organisation, and as CSV, one line per programme. Both files carry every source, mark and date, and state their licence.

Areas, distances and the map

Areas are groups of parishes under the names families use (Foz, Boavista, Paranhos, Campanhã, Leça da Palmeira, Mafamude, Rio Tinto) and, for Maia, the whole municipality. Each site belongs to the area whose official boundary, as mapped in OpenStreetMap, contains it.

Distance is measured in a straight line from the point you choose to the nearest site, in steps of half a kilometre. Your location is asked for only when you press the button, and it never leaves your browser.