Zainab Husein
At midnight on April 25th, 1974, a radio station broadcasts Grândola, Vila Morena, a folk song banned under the current dictatorship. It was the signal. Junior military officers across Portugal, fed up with Salazar’s forty-eight-year Estado Novo and its unwinnable colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, started moving tanks toward Lisbon. By morning, everything was over. An old woman handed a soldier a carnation, then he put it in his rifle barrel. A revolution had begun and ended. These three locations below not only commemorate but help us all to remember this vital history, one which we must not be forgetten.
Ponte 25 de Abril:
When the bridge first opened in 1966, it was called Ponte Salazar and named, with the regime’s usual lack of subtlety, after the dictator himself. Built by the same American firm that designed the Golden Gate, it was a prestige project, meant to signal modernity, all while the secret police, the PIDE, were still arresting people for saying the wrong thing at dinner. After the coup, the bridge was renamed to Ponte 25 de April. It might seem like a small thing, renaming a bridge. But under a regime that controlled what you could read and what you could sing, nothing could ever be considered truly small. The move to change the name of the bridge allowed us all to have a constant reminder of the fight for liberation within a vitally important everyday space.
Largo do Carmo
This location is where everything all started and ended. Marcelo Caetano, who had inherited the Estado Novo after Salazar’s death in 1970, barricaded himself inside the GNR headquarters on the Largo do Carmo while the captains’ tanks surrounded the square. He held out through the afternoon, then surrendered to General Spínola in the early evening. Power changed quietly here in this square in a building next to a roofless Gothic church that had been a ruin since the 1755 earthquake. Caetano flew to Madeira that night, then to Brazil. He never returned. The PIDE officers who’d run the torture cells were arrested within days. Political prisoners were released. People tore up their identity books, which, under the old regime, had to be stamped by their employers, essentially giving them permission to exist. To this day, people celebrate here on April 25th, and walking through the square, you can truly see its history unfold in front of you.
Avenida da Liberdade
The irony of the name is almost too much. The Avenue of Freedom was built in the 1880s, long before the dictatorship, and the Estado Novo kept it. Every April 25th, Lisbon fills the Avenida with people and carnations. The small red flower became the symbol of the revolution almost by accident: a flower seller near the Mercado da Ribeira had a bucket of them left over, handed them out, and something stuck. For fifty years on, people still pin them to their coats on the anniversary. The ones who lived through it and the ones who didn’t, both remembering, because some things are just too important not to remember out loud.
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