Rádio Renascença (the Rua Capelo studios)

In April 1974 the Rádio Renascença studios were here, on the second floor of no. 5 Rua Capelo. The MFA chose this station for the confirmation signal: “Grândola, Vila Morena” (Grândola, swarthy town), on the programme Limite, at 00:20 on 25 April.¹⁸

The contact was made through journalists from the daily República. On 23 April, Álvaro Guerra, sent by Almada Contreiras, asked Carlos Albino — one of the makers of Limite — to broadcast “Venham Mais Cinco” (Let five more come). The song was banned by Renascença’s internal censorship, so Carlos Albino suggested alternatives, with “Grândola” at the top of the list.³⁶ On the morning of the 24th the final choice and the time were settled: between 00:20 and 00:22.⁷ As a precaution, Carlos Albino bought the record Cantigas do Maio (Songs of May) that day, fearing that the political police might raid the programme’s offices, in Praça de Alvalade.⁴¹³

Limite faced two censorships: the station’s own and the official one, exercised by a colonel who followed the broadcasts live and vetted the scripts. To settle the details safely, Carlos Albino and the programme’s technical and sound manager, Manuel Tomás, left the studios and knelt in the Church of São João de Brito, pretending to pray.⁵ They then recorded a sequence of about ten minutes in which the reading of the song’s first verse was linked to other texts, in the voice of the announcer Leite de Vasconcelos, who did not know what the recording was for.⁷

That night the announcer on duty was Paulo Coelho, who, unaware of the arrangement, brought forward the reading of the advertisements and nearly made them miss the exact time. According to the 25 April Association, Manuel Tomás gave a small, apparently accidental nudge to the hand of the sound technician José Videira, setting the reel running: out came Leite de Vasconcelos’s recorded voice and José Afonso’s song. At the end, the censor present is said to have shown signs of having heard something he had not expected.²

After 11 March 1975, the station’s Lisbon studios were occupied by a workers’ committee, opening the “Caso Renascença” (the Renascença affair), which divided the country and only ended with the destruction, on the government’s orders, of the Buraca transmitters, on 7 November 1975.¹¹