Carnation Revolution (1974): PREC / decolonisation

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.

A radio song, a flower, and three African wars 25 April was gentle in Lisbon because it was exhausted in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique -- a soldiers' coup against a war the dictatorship would not end. A decade of African wars, a closed political system, and junior officers who could not see a military victory produced the MFA. Spinola's book Portugal and the Future (1974) cracked public speech.