Carnation Revolution (1974): The day

The 25 April 1974 MFA coup that ended the Estado Novo with carnations in rifle barrels -- a junta against a dictatorship, not a manual. In the early hours of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew Marcelo Caetano's Estado Novo, the dictatorship Salazar had built. A banned song, "Grandola, Vila Morena," played on the radio as a signal. Troops secured Lisbon with almost no fighting. Crowds put red carnations in rifle barrels -- the image that named the revolution.

Four people died when regime police fired on a crowd. Caetano surrendered at the Carmo barracks to General Spinola. The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau -- the officers' wound -- ended in a rush of independences (1974-75) and in chaotic, sometimes violent decolonisations, especially Angola.

Intensity in this atlas is near the floor: a coup that refused a bloodbath at home. Political impact was real: democracy in Portugal, an end to Europe's last large colonial war, and a PREC (ongoing revolutionary process) that frightened NATO allies until the 1976 constitution. English memory is a pretty flower and a Eurovision-adjacent folk song. This page keeps the wars in Africa in the paragraph. It is not a how-to.