Thousands of people sing the folk song Grandola, Vila Morena, in the first minutes of Thursday, April 25, 2024, at the Carmo square in Lisbon, as the country celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. The song by Zeca Afonso was broadcast on national radio as a signal to the troops that the coup was starting and became an icon of the April 25, 1974, revolution that restored democracy in Portugal after 48 years of a fascist dictatorship.
At the time, the turmoil and political uncertainty in Portugal, a NATO member, caused alarm in Western capitals as the Portuguese Communist Party appeared poised to take power. Moderate parties, however, won at the ballot box. Soldiers were due later to depict the insurrectionists’ convergence on a paramilitary garrison in a jacaranda-dotted square called Largo do Carmo. That was where Marcelo Caetano, the Portuguese leader at the time, holed up and was surrounded by troops and jubilant civilians before surrendering.
Simmering frustration with prolonged colonial wars against independence movements in Africa spurred the junior officers’ revolt, which succeeded in toppling the dictatorship in around 24 hours with only five deaths.