22:55
In the late hours of 24th April, 1974, the night does not announce itself.
It settles into the narrow street. Into the spaces between buidings where sound carries just a little too far. It settles into homes where windows are closed before words are spoken too loudly.
Lisbon, like the rest of the country, knows how to hold a night a night like this, almost eerily.
In the distance, a radio merely left on rather than listened to, hums somewhere softly. In a kitchen, perhaps. Or a café preparing to close. Or beside someone who has long since learned that sound is safer when it is ordinary…
And then a song begins to play…
♫
…E Depois do Adeus, by Paulo de Carvalho.
Nothing about it was seeking attention, nor was it asking it be remembered in any way. It passed softly through the air the way all permitted thing do, and yet, somewhere, someone stilled. Not enough to be noticed, mind you, but just enough to hear it properly, and to recognize it was not merely music being played. But that it held meaning.
The city didn’t change when Carvalho’s love song played. Trams carried on, not stopping mid-track. Doors were not thrown open, nor voices raised above another. Everything visibly continued as it always had. But the air changed, whispering a melody filled with meaning that only those privy to it understood.
Behind walls that did not speak, and across distances not marked on any map a civilian would recongize and understand, men, who had already made their decisions, waited. Nothing left to discuss, nothing left to be said. The only thing that remained, was to follow a carefully orchestrated plan.
Time moved, yet somehow, to those who knew, it felt suspended. It stretched, thin and taut, between what had been done before, and what had not yet begun.
23:12
Perhaps a light turns off somewhere it normally wouldn’t. Or maybe, a door closes more cautiously than usual. Or maybe, its an engine the starts, then stops, then starts again.
Nothing that could be called unusual to catch attention. Nothing that could be named.
But still, the air whistles its silent tune, woven within its soft April breeze from across the Tejo. Because Lisbon knew what was or the horizon, and within her shadows, she masked a secret on the verge of unravel.
23:27
The city breathes the way it has been taught to breathe after so many years.
Carefully, measured. Without drawing attention to herself, just as she has done so for decades.
She knows that she is about to forget how soon… and she relishes in the thought of being able to return to herself, refreshed.
23:41
Movement exists now, but only if you know where to look.
A shift here.
A delay there.
A presence that did not belong, but was not questioned, because questioning had never been the habit…
00:00
The clock struck midnight, and the day changes. The night deepened now, as few held their breathes, waiting.
And with it, something else did as well.
Something close to inevitability.
00:20
12:20 struck, and with it, everything else, too, as a second song enters into the air…
♫
Grândola, Vila Morena
Terra da fraternidade
…Grândola, Vila Morena by José Afonso.
It would not slip unnoticed, it wouldn’t ever have been able to.
O povo é quem mais ordena
Dentro de ti, ó cidade
It is not just that the song is heard, but rather, that it is allowed to be.
A voice long kept from the airwaves now moved freely through them uninterrupted and uncontained.
There was no announcement or declaration. No voices to confirm what was in the midsts of happening. But for those who were waiting, there is no longer any doubt that the wait was over.
Movement followed in answer. It wasn’t all at once, or even loud. But it was everywhere.
And by the time the city began to wake; before the first full light settled across her curved terracotta rooftops… the country had already began to change.
Our story doesn’t begin here; like this… No story such as ours ever could.
And despite the fact that, if you stayed, living within those moments in the dead of night long enough, you could almost believe it had arrived out of nowhere… it didn’t.
Though this night started with a song.
Then another.
And then, a shift.
It wasn’t the beginning.
History certainly does not break without first bending. And Portugal had been bending relentlessly for far longer than a single night could ever hold.
Come back further with me. Before the songs, and before the silence broke; to a time, when the silence was all there was…
If you had walked through Portugal in the decades before that night, you would not have necessarily seen anything that announced itself as oppression. There were no real visible fractures in the streets, no daily spectacles of fore that marked the country as unstable or unraveling. Life, on its surface, moved with a kind of quiet order; or at least, I’ve been told.
Trams ran while families gathered. Conversations unfolded in kitchens and cafés much as they did anywhere else, and still do today. But beneath that surface of façade, was a carefulness to just about everything.
It was not always spoken about directly, mind you, because it did not need to be. It was just simply, understood. It lived in the way voices lowered without being asked, or in the way certain topics dissolved before they could fully form. There was an instinct to measure not just what was said, but who might be listening when it was said.
This, was the legacy of the Estado Novo…
Under the leadership of António de Oliveira Salazar, and later Marcelo Caetano, Portugal was not governed through chaos or overt instability, but through control that was steady, deliberate, and deeply embedded into the rhythms of daily life.
Censorship itself, did not always arrive as something dramatic, at least not publically. More often than not, it arrived as absence, with its weight felt from articles that never made it to print or voiced that were never given the space to be heard.
The PIDE—the Portuguese political police (formerly PVDE, and later DGS)—did not need to be visible everywhere to be felt anywhere, either. Their presence existed in the uncertainty they created, and in the knowledge that information travelled in ways you could not necessarily trace. They instilled a fear that a conversation shared too free might not remain where you left it; that a neighbour, a colleague, or even someone you trusted, could become the reason you were questioned, or worse.
So people learned to be silent. Because if there’s one thing that became evident, it was that where silence was not chosen, it could however, be enforced.
People learned how to exist within a muted society. How to move through their own lives wihtut drawing attention. They leaned how to hold opinions privately, or at least, soften them, until they no longer resembled anything that could be considered dangerous.
Silence, over time, stopped feeling like restraint, and instead, became a habit.
I was not there. I did not live through those years under the Estado Novo myself. But I did grow up amidst what it left behind, being rasied in the habits that lingered long after the regime itself had fallen.
Not in fear, exactly, but in something slightly adjacent to it, maybe. A kind of inherited caution that wasn’t exactly present, but shaped behaviour all the same without really understanding why.
I grew up in a household where openness was something to be measured. Where speaking too freely, too directly, or too confidently, could be met not with disagreement, but rather with a curt and immediate correction—
“Lower your voice”
”Be careful”
”You don’t know who might hear you”
These were not rules explained in full, they were just merely instincts passed down, that, as a young child, I didn’t understand. But I would, later.
My mother grew up in a building situated within one of Lisbon’s-then most prestigious neighbourhoods. My grandfather was a government employee within the Brazilian Embassy, and my grandmother the perfect homemaker. They dined with government officials, travelled with Ambassadors, and sipped tea and bitter bicas amongst what was close enough to have been considered nobility at the time. I came to learn, the life that I enjoyed so much as a child while with my grandparents, was quite the façade in the 50s, 60s and 70s, because beneath the perfection that their lives appeared to have been, there was actually a lot of fear instilled.
Within their building, resided two PIDE officers; one on the first floor, and another on the second. She speaks of it now not with any sort of dramatics, but with a kind of matter-of-face clarity that make it all the more unsettling. The building and her neighbourhood, like many others, held a division that I still cannot seem to quite wrap my head around, if I’m honest. You had those who were careful, and those, who were useful. Those who kept to themselves, and those who understood how to navigate the system to their advantage.
No one needed to explain which was safer. The reality was, neither truly was. You could still be picked up, in the middle of the night, right from the comfort of your own bed. Be it for information provided by the useful, or those same useful being picked from their slumber because their information didn’t quite meet expectation… And she witnessed its aftermath on more than one ocassion.
My father’s experiences were a bit different, leaning a little more telling, yet somehow, also leaving him a little more…care-free, if you can believe it. He has described moment that, on their own, sound almost absurd in their simplicity. Being detained with a group of commuters after stepping off a bus in Benfica. Being taken in after reporting my grandfathers car which had been stolen, had been found nearby—its window broken and its fuel gone; nothing more than a joyride. There was no crime in the act of reporting it, but still, he was held. Not because he had done something wrong, but because authority did not need a reason to assert itself.
These are just a few tales of many. And the crazy thing is, these are not extraordinary stories. That in itself, I think, it was stays with me—the fact that they are completely ordinary for the time.
They are the kinds of moments that settle into memory and become aprt of how a person understands the world around them. Not through singular acts of violence or radical performance, but through repetition. Through unpredictability. Through the steady erosion of certainty about what is safe and what is not.
This was the environment Portugal carried through during its regime of fascism…
It was a country not erupting, but merely containing itself. A country, where control had become so deeply integrated into daily life that it no longer needed to be imposed loudly. It was instead maintained through awareness and through caution. Through the understanding that speaking was, at times, not without consequence.
The thing is, Portugal had not always lived this way. Silence, like anything else, had to be learned. And before it became instinct settling into household and conversations, it was built. Deliberately. Piece by piece, until it no longer felt constructed at all.
In the 1930s, as much of Europe shifted uneasily beneath the weight of political extremes, Portugal turned inward.
Under Salazar, the Estado Novo took shape not as a regime laced in ridiculous display, but as one of control thrugh stability. Or at least that was how it presented itself. It promised order in a world that seemed increasingly defined by unrest. It positioned itself against the perceived chaos of liberalism, the threat of communism, and the volatility of a continent inching toward war.
For a time, that promise truly did hold a certain appeal. Portugal did not descent into the same visible devastations that would later define much of Europe during World War II—though, it doesn’t mean the country and its people had been left unscathed.
There were no bombed cities, no occupation forces marching through its streets. From the outside, it appeared removed from the worst of it. But “distance” from war. didn’t mean absence of it, nor of its consequences. And consequently, in the end, it meant control could tighten without interruption.
As the rest of the world fractured and rebuilt, Portugal remained relatively contained and insulated. One may even go so far as to say increasingly rigid in its structure. The regime chose neutrality, and with that, they strengthened its hold not through moments of rupture, but through continuity. Through the careful shaping of what could be seen, what could be said, and even, what could be known.
Information started, slowly, being filtered. Opposition was limited before it could gather form in order to not sharpen its teeth. And overtime, systems were put into place to ensure that deviation did not go unnoticed.
It was within this environment that the political police at the time, PVDE, expanded and rebranded inot what it would become—PIDE—not simply an institution, but a shadowed presence. One that did not always need to act in order to be effective.
The fear of communism, particularly, in the post-war years, become one of the regime’s strongest justifications for its methods. It alloweed surveillance to be framed as protection. Control to be framed as necessity. And dissent, be it real or imagined, to be framed as a threat to the nation.
From there, the lines all seem to have blurred in some off-handed zone struck between safety and restriction; between loyalty and suspicion; between neighbours and observers.
Political prisoners were endless, and prisons overflowed. Our government even went to far as to take a page out of Hitler’s playbook, and created a solitary prison on a remote part of Cabo Verde—a concentration camp, in truth, strictly, for those who stood up or spoke against the regime. It was for the safety of a country still mending… Or at least, that was a safety-net excuse. But those left behind after a loved one had vanished, or cast off on a ship, knew better when the minutes turned to hours, the hours to days, and so forth. And with that, silence was taught all the faster.
By the time the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the structure was alreafy established. It has settled into the coutnry not as something temporary, but rather as something enduring. It became a system that had, over decades, shaped not just in governance, but behaviour as well.
Most people settled in to their newly acquired roles, and their newly developed routines, turning a blind-eye, and keeping their mouths shut, in hopes it would guarantee their safety. They didn’t need to be told to be careful, because they’d already learned they had to be.
This, is the Portugal my parents were born into. Not in the early moments of its creation, but rather the results of it. A country where silence was no longer imposed as something external, but carried internally. Where caution was not always enforced, but practiced.
By then, PIDE was no longer just an institution people feared, but it had actually turned into something people anticipated. Something that existed in the background of daily life, even when it was not not necessarily visible—actually, especially, when it wasn’t visible.
And so, the stories I grew up hearing—the ones taht seemed small when spoken aloud, even almost incidental in their details, when recognizing where it was all deriving from, started to almost make sense as normal.
And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous part of it all.
It’s not the fear itself, or even the control and silence.
it’s the ease with which is all began to feel…normal.
Because when something become a norm, it stops being questioned. It stops being resisted. it simply become the way things are. It becomes accepted, and carreid forward without ever quite being challenged in full.
For a time, that actually was enough.
It was enoguh to maintain order, enough to preserve the illusion of stability.
It was enough to keep a country quiet.
That is, until, the regime made a mistake. And that, was a trigger-point into, finally, a nation preparing to say “enough, is enough.” Not loudly, mind you. It was definitely not in ways that could be immediately named or even pointed to. But, with each passing moment, and each extended agitation, it became more and more steadily shaped.
While Portugal remained contained within itself, the world beyond its borders was shifting. Changing and moving forward in ways that the regime refused to acknowledge, let alone follow
And inside the country, too, there were those who could no longer ignore the weight of what had been built or the repercussions that followed.
Not because they had suddenly become defiant. But because they have begun to see, with increasing clarity, that what was being held onto was broken, and could not last forever.
Silence may have withstood, but it came at a cost. And that cost was no longer something that could remain hidden beneath routine, or softened by habit. So slowly, it began to surface in places the regime could not fully control, and more so, in people it could no longer fully command—and they, themselves, were probably one of the biggest surprises of all to the regime.
Here’s the thing—things for the Salazar government didn’t break all at once. That is not how something built over decades gives way to collapse. A lot of the time, it actually tightens first, and resists. It holds on longer than it should, while still appearing to remain intact. Long enough that those within it can almost convince themselves that it will continue to hold.
But pressure is quite an interesting thing when you think about it. So much beauty can be born through it. But before you get your polished and sparkling diamond, as an example, the coal is going to feel some weight…
For Portugal, that pressure didn’t even begin within her native borders. It didn’t start in the capital, nor in the remnants of laboured-intensive mines build in poor conditions…
It actually began far from the mist-filled streets and shuttered windows. Far from the cafés where conversations were softened, and teh homes where silence had long since been learned…
It began, instead, in 1961, in Angola.
What unfolded there was not, at first, understood as the beginning of something that would consume an entire nation. It was framed, as so many things had been, as something manageable and temporary.
A slight uprising, they said; a mild disturbance. Something that could easily be handled. The problem, though, was that Angola was no alone. Guinea-Bissau followed. Mozambique after that. And what had begun as something distant, become a war without a clear end; stretched not only across continents, but across years.
For those at home, the war didn’t initially feel like there was any cause for alarm. There wasn’t any particular immediacy of destruction—let’s be frank, this wasn’t a war that came to us; we instead, went to it. So rather than bombs falling over Lisbon or Porto, we were met instead with absence.
Young men leaving and not returning; or at times, returning changed—older than they shuold have been, even quieter than they once were, broken; emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Letters were sent acorss oceans, carrying fragments of a reality that could not be fully described nor understood. And with each passing year, the distance between what was being said, and waht was being lived, began to widen.
For those within the military, that distance was particularly impossible to ignore. After all, they were he ones asked to sustain it. To fight a war that no longer made sense in the way it once had. To maintain the idea of an empire that the rest of the world had already begun to relinquish. To uphold a structure that was not evolving, nor acknowledging the reality unfolding beyond its borders.
The regime, for its part, didn’t bend. Even under Marcelo Caetano, who had succeeded António Salazar in 1968, and placed notions of possible reforms in the head of his citizens, didn’t actually allow change to happen. If anything, it somehow felt worse, as a failing continuations of a regime that was becoming untenable due to the costs of an unsustainable colonial war, who made suggestions without actions.
And actions, when it came to the question of the colonial wars ends, never truly arrived. So wars continued, and costs deepened. And the burden fell, increasingly, on those who had once been expected only to carry it.
By the early 1970s, the strain was no longer abstract. It became structural, existing in the economy, and stretched thin by the cost of a war that demadned more than it coud upholf. It existed in the military, where promotions stalled, careers stagnated, countless died, conscriptions excelled, and frustrations sharpened into something more defined.
As young conscripts returned home with harsh forms of PTSD and stories of a futile war, an understanding began to form that professional officers were the ones responsible for sending their own countrymen to die, for a cause they no longer even believed in. And this all existed in the realization that there was no clear resolution in sight.
It is one thing to endure something difficult when there is a means to an end. It is another entirely, to have to endure somethin that does not appear to be moving toward any end at all.
In 1973, that realization had found a voice within the very institution the regime depended on to maintain itself. When military General, António de Spínola, published Portugal and the Future, it did not introduce something entirely new. The doubts and concerns that had already existed beneath the surface amongst soldiers and civilians alike, only exhausted futher the acknowledgements of failure.
The argument was simple, and because of that, it was all rather impossible to ignore.
The war could not be won by force.
That statement did not, on its own, bring anything to an end. But it did manage to give shape to what had, until then, remained largely unspoken. And once something is recognized, articulated, and shared, it becomes far more difficult to contain…
Within the Armed Forces, particularly among younger and mid-ranking officers, a shift was already underway the moment Spínola was removed from his position, merely for voices a truth the regime refused to grasp. They had seen war firsthand; they carried it, and they had begun to understand, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, that what was beign asked of them no longer aligned withwhat was possible, or what was right.
From there, something formed. As though those involved knew, instinctively, that whatever came next would need to be measured against everything that had come before. It couldn’t be something reckless or sudden, but rather deliberate, careful, and organized.
The Armed Forces Movement—the MFA—was not born out of a single moment, nor a singularact of defiance. It emerged from accumulation and shared experiences. From the slow, undeniable recognition that the system they were part of was broken beyond repair and needed to change.
By early 1974, the structure was no longer simply under pressure, but blatantly beginning to fail. Attempts to suppress that failure, such as the uprising at Caldas da Rainha in March, did not restore control. If anything, they revealed just how far it had already slipped. And once that was visible, it could no longer be denied.
By then, the silence that had once held the country together was beginning to loosenits grip just enough that when the movement came, it would not be met with just as much recognition as resistance. So when the time the night of 24th April arrived… Portugal was no longer simply waiting—it was ready.
When the signal came…it was not the beginning, but rather the answer.
Let’s return then, to that night—
to the hours that followed midnight when whathad been building for decades finally began to crumble.
As the final notes of Grândola, Vila Morena carried through the airwaves, something imperceptible to most; unmistakable to a few, shifted from waiting into action.
There was no proclamation to mark it, nor publication issued inot the night to signal that the cuntry had crossed into something new.
But across Lisbon and far beyond it, order were already being followed as unit began to move. There was no frantic urgency to thier motion, nor disarray or confusion. Each movement had been considered long before it was carried out. Each route understood, and each objective across the country defined.
From barracks and bases, convoys emerged into the night purposefully. They amply entered the streets without flooding them. Measured in their advance, disciplined in their quietness, they moved forward toward the places that matter most—not to the public eyes, but to the structure of the State itself.
Between 03:00–04:00, troops went toward broadcast stations, the airport, the ports military headquarters, and government buildings; strategically, they sought the arteries through which control had long been maintained.
Communications which had been so carefully controlled for decades became one of the first things to shift. Radio stations, once governed by restrictions and oversight, were taken and repurposed. Messages began to move differently now as instructions, confirmations, controlled transmissions were guiding the unfolding operations.
At 04:27, a voice came across the radio, as the MFA issued their first bbroadcast across airwaves, asking a population to remain at home and avoid confrontations…
“Mantenha a calma, e se recolha às suas residências.
Viva Portugal!”
——
”Stay calm, and stay home.
Long live Portugal!”
To those not expecting it, it did not immediately register as a breach. Sure, it felt…unusual; then, unfamiliar. But as Portugals madrugada—the early hour before dawn—drew on, things were becoming noticeable.
At 06:15, as dawn rose across a country holding its breathe, the forces unleashed from Santarém’s Cavalry Practical School, arrived in Lisbon, lead by Salgueiro Maia to control the city’s Terreiro do Paço square without resistance.
Lisbon, ever so coy and observant, did not erupt at their arrival. She absorbed the gallantry; a tank at an intersections where one had not stood the night before; a convoy passing through a street that had, until then, belonged only to early morning quiet. Figures moved with intent where there had once only been stillness.
What is perhaps most striking, in hindsight, is not that the coup succeeded, but how little resistance it met in those first crucial hours. The regime, built on control, did not respond with immediate force.
Whether through hesitations, miscalculations, or sheer precision of what had already been set in motion, the structure in itself did not strike back with the violence it had so long reserved for dissent, and so, the movement continued…
By the time the city began to shit from night into early morning, the foundations of pwoer had already been intercepted. They weren’t being destroyed, just…taken. And yet, for many, the full wieght of what was happening hadn’t yet settled fully.
By 07:00, people stepped out into the streets cautiously, defying order to remain indoors.
They were met with soldiers—troops by thousands.
They were not out in passing. Nor were they contained to barracks or distant exercises. They were just standing, right there, within the city itself, unnerved and reserved. Tanks, too, deliberately occupying space rather than tearing through it.
There was no immediate panic, and that in itself, is important to understand. Because what Lisbon felt in those first moments wasn’t fear, but uncertainty. People did what people always do in moments that do not yet make sense—they watched. They stood at windows first, then at doorways next.
It hadn’t taken long for curiosity to overcome caution. Something about the soliders didn’t align with what fear should have looked it. They weren’t advancing on the people. They weren’t dispersing crowds or enforcing silence. They were merely… waiting.
And in that wait, came interaction. There was a word exchanged here, or a question asked there, as few wandered into the street to understand what was happening. Hesitations slowly turned into conversations. And with each small moment, recognition moved through the city that this was not an occupation, nor an invasion.
For the first time in decades, the presence of armed men in the streets did not signal control. And though no formal annuncement had been made to explain what was happening, people understood.
For years, authority in Portugal had not needed to hesitate. It has always just acted swiftly and often without warning; an control was maintained over decades not only through presence, but through consequence. And so, even as the city began to see its residents edge forward into a moment that did not yet have a name, there lingered the expectation that it could still turn, as people wondered how the regime would respond.
At around 09:00, that question found its answer. Loyalist to the regime positioned themselves against the military units aligned with the Armed Forces Movement. The lines, though not formally drawn, were suddenly clear enough to feel feel as orders were issues and weapons were raised.
For a moment, however brief and suspended, it seemed as though everything might collapse into violence; exactly what Portugal was fearing through wavered breathes.
Navy units were maneuvering themselves in front of Terreiro do Paço on orders by the Estado Novo government, with the instruction to fire upon Salgueiro Maio and his troops in the square.
But then, nothing happened.
The order to fire was given, and it was simply just not obeyed.
While the Navy had not initially been involved in the coup lead by the April-Captains, a clandestine group of naval officers supported the MFA movement, contributing to the ultimate paralysis of the regimes loyalists.
By late-morning, people were no longer watching from a distance. What had begun in ambiguity with glimpses from behind curtains or half-opened doors, no longer held any room for doubt. They stepped out onto cobblestone from doorways, as Lisbon flooded by civilians to support the insurgent military. And as people began to gather with a need to witness and support what was unfolding in front of them, there was a growing sense of possibility as Lisbon was transforming into the centre of a revolution.
It’s difficult to overstate what that meant meant in the moment. Not in theory, but there, in the streets, where tensions had reached their breaking point, yet held strong. Authority, which has always relied on action, faltered. Power, which had always moved downwards, hesitated.
The absence of gunfire did not simply preserve life, but it changed the nature of the moment in itself, and people felt it. And as the morning stretched into its final moments, Lisbon was no longer standing at the edge of history, but rather, she was the centre of it; living directly within it as the Carnation Revolution engulfed a nation in the brink of change.
So what of the carnations, anyway? Well, simply put, it didn’t begin as a symbol.
Celeste Caeiro was not a solider, nor a strategist.She was by no means a figure anyone would have pointed to in the early hours of that day, as someone who would become a significant part of todays memory.
She was a waitress. And that morning, she had gone to work expecting to celebrate the one year anniversary of the restaurant where she was employed. There was meant to be a celebration filled with meals served and glasses filled.
But instead, the doors never opened. The unfolding events across the city made that impossible, and so like many others, she was sent away, back into a Lisbon that was no longer behaving as it had the ngiht before.
She did not, however, leave empty handed. In her arms, she carried a bundle of red carnations, originally meant to be given to patrons for the celebration that would not have space to take place.
As she walked, the streets were no longer quiet. By then, soldiers stood among civilians as allies. Somewhere, within that convergence and confusion, Celeste asked a solider that was happening, to which she received the response that they were moving into the Largo do Carmo square, to apprehend Marcelo Caetano and gain Portugal her freedom.
Amidst an exchange of pleasantries, the solider asked if Celeste may have a cigarette in which she could offer him. She didn’t. And as she looked around the stores closed, and tobacco huts still shuttered, she lamented not being able to aid the soldier in his requested. Instead, she offered him one of her carnation, which he accepted. And instead of holding it, he placed it inside the barrel of his rifle.
One carnation, turned to two, two to three, and soon, her bundle had dispersed amongst the soldiers, all placed within their rifles.
It is easy now, to look back and see this as symbolism. To name it and understand what it came to represent. But in the moment, it was merely a gesture. And from that gesture, a weapon, long associated with control, now held something that would not harm. It was something fragile, and something alive; much like the people.
So as the day drew on, the streets were no longer just filled with people, but filled with colour. Red against metal, life against the machinery of force. And from there, the revolution found its image built from kindness and gratitude, brought on by the single distribution of a flower.
By mid-day, Marcelo Caetano had retreated, taking refuge in the Carmo Barracks.
There is something almost painfully fitting about the imagine of the head of a regime built on order, authority, and surveillence enclosed within stone walls, while the country outside began rearranging itself without him. He didn’t stand before the people or command the streets back into silence. He just withdrew into the headquarters of the National Republican Guard at Largo do Carmo, and there, surrounded by the MFA, 48 years of dictatorship were being counted down to its final hours.
The people had become part of the days occurrences. They stood in the square, pressed into the surrounding streets, watching the building that now held not only Caetano, but the visible shape of the Estado Novo’s power.
For so long, authority had lived everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It resided within office buildings and police station; within whispered warning or the way neighbuors watched one another. But now, for one strange afternoon, it seemed to have been condensed into one place; within on building and one surrounded door.
Everyone waited while negotiations spread across hours, within and around the barracks, as the afternoon spread on. It was by no means the suspended wait of the early hours in the day, when song moved secretly through rafio waves and men waited for signals only they understood. But publicly, a nation and her people waited for the final crash that would lead to their liberation.
The MFA forces remained positioned outside, as each hour carried the possibility that restraint would fail. A regime does not surrender merely because history has decided it should. It searches, instead, for ways to leave withut admitting that it had already been defeated.
Caetano, by then, understood enough to know that the structure around him had collapsed. But even in collapse, there was calculation to be made. He refused to hand power to Captain Salgueiro Maia, whose forces surrounded him, insisting instead on surrendering to General António de Spínola who has arrived at Carmo to negotiate the transfer of power, reportedly fearing that otherwise, power would be thrown into the streets.
It’s fitting, really, that Caetano would relinquish himself and his cabinet solely to the man, in which he’d dismissed from his post as Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff not long before.
But just like that, as the clocked reached 18:00 and church bells rang across a city, Caetano official agreed to surrender.
In an RTP—Rádio e Televisão de Portugal; Portugal’s public broadcast channel—archive, there is footage which records Spínola’s arrival for the surrender negotiations, and Salgueiro Maia preparing to enter the barracks to escort Caetano and ministers from his cabinet. And even to this day, this footage still manages to give me goosebumps.
I like to imagine that the sounds moving through the city rang differently that evening; that it was something all the more noticed. Bell chimes over terracotta and stone, over crowds gathered in squares, over soldiers still holding their positions, and over rifles softened by carnations.
For nearly half a century, Portugal had been taught to lower its voice. But in that moment, in a city that had spent the day disobeying silence, bells marked the hour when the old regime finally fell.
The regime that had taught generations to fear their own voices had been brought to its knees by soldiers who refused to fire, civilians who refused to stay indoors, songs that carried meaning through the dark, and by flowers placed where bullets might have been.
And for the first time, in a very long time, Portugal could begin to hear herself again as intended.
Today, 25th April, is still a day to remember and celebrate—not just the day in itself, but the memory of everything that lead to making it monumental. The past, when we look to it, has so much to say if only we listen. And maybe that is one of the reason I return to stories. History, when left to dates and outcomes, risks becoming something distant, contained merely within textbooks and timelines, filed away as though it has already finished unfolding.
History though, it lingers. It lives within memory and behaviour. It lives in the way a country learns to speak, or even forgets how to. In the stories passed down at kitchen tables, half explained and half understood, until someone pauses long enough to ask where it all came from.
Stories give history a pulse back in a new light. They allow us to step into moments we did not live thorugh, and yet somehow feel. They allow us to understand not only what happened, but what it meant. To somehow meet the people who stood in those streets, and held their breaths in those hours.
If you’re looking to understand the weight of regimes like the Estado Novo, or the resilience of those who lived beneath them, there are stories that carry those truths; both fiction and non-fiction, in a way that will place you there as it all happened.
Books that remind us that freedom, once lost, is never easily reclaimed, and once found, should never be taken for granted.
Long after the carnations had faded and the songs had ended, what remains are the stories we choose to keep telling, and how we choose to tell them…
So in honour of fifty-years of liberation, I would love to share every book, be it memoir or fiction, that had a place on this list. The problem, however, is so few seem to have been translated to english. So today, instead an endless array of recommendations, I’ll leave you a short stack of must-reads, in no particular order.
Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso
The Captains’ Coup: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Portugal by Wilfred Burchett
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson
Portugal and the Future by António de Spínola
Carnation Revolution: Volume 1 by José Augusto Matos
The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes
Raised From the Ground by José Saramago
Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes
Eyes Open by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Liberdade Sempre ✌︎︎