The days of freedom

In an annexe of these barracks of Engineering Regiment No. 1, prepared in secret, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and a handful of officers directed the operations of 25 April: windows covered with blankets, tables with radios and telephones, military maps of Lisbon on the walls, and the intercepted radio traffic of the GNR, the Legion, the DGS and the PSP coming in through a cable rigged up in secret.⁴

Early in the evening the Chaimite armoured car “Bula” arrived, with Marcelo Caetano and two ministers, who were held here until morning.⁶⁷ Since 2001 the command post has been a museum; it reopened in 2025 after building work.⁵

At Caxias the political police resisted, and the release was delayed: the National Salvation Junta wanted to separate those imprisoned for ideological reasons from those accused of common crimes. “All of us or none” (Ou todos ou ninguém), the prisoners replied. Close to midnight the order came to release them all; they began to walk out at 00:30 on 27 April, and by one in the morning there were no political prisoners left in Caxias.⁸

Among the women released were the journalists Helena Neves and Elvira Nereu. From 1938, it was in the North Redoubt of this fort that women political prisoners were held on remand and served their sentences.⁹¹⁷

On the 25th, Mário Soares was in Bonn. Three days later he arrived here by train, with Maria Barroso, also a founder of the Socialist Party. A crowd was waiting for them; Soares spoke from a balcony of the station, loudhailer in hand.¹⁰ The Casa Comum photographs show Ramos da Costa and Manuel Tito de Morais on the balcony with them.¹¹

The station had seen another crowd before: the one that waited for Humberto Delgado in May 1958, which the GNR dispersed with baton charges through the Baixa.¹²

In the early hours of 25 April, soldiers from the Infantry Practical School occupied the airport and closed the airspace. On the morning of the 26th, Marcelo Caetano and Américo Tomás left from here on an Air Force plane for Funchal.¹³

On 30 April Álvaro Cunhal arrived after fourteen years in exile, greeted by a crowd; he climbed onto a Chaimite to speak to it. That day, a communiqué from the National Salvation Junta authorised the return of all political exiles.¹⁰

On 27 April a decree made May Day (1 May) a national holiday — the revolution’s first legal achievement, in the words of the Aljube Museum.¹ In Lisbon the march gathered here, on the Alameda, and went on to the stadium of the former FNAT. The Commemorative Commission estimates that around a million people took to the streets across the country; the 25 April Documentation Centre, that around five hundred thousand marched in Lisbon.⁴¹⁴

The stadium belonged to the FNAT, the National Foundation for Joy at Work, a regime body; that day it was renamed Estádio 1.º de Maio (May Day Stadium). Mário Soares and Álvaro Cunhal arrived surrounded by thousands of people and embraced at the rally, under the slogan “Peace, Bread and Freedom” (Paz, Pão e Liberdade). The Commemorative Commission calls it the first and last May Day in unity.⁴

On 25 April 1975, in the first free elections, twenty women were elected among the 250 deputies to the Constituent Assembly; with resignations and replacements, twenty-seven came to hold a seat, among them Maria Alda Nogueira, Helena Roseta and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Only six sat on committees, and only one chaired one: Sophia, the committee that drafted the preamble. In the plenary sessions the men were addressed as “Sr. Deputado” (Mr Deputy); the women, often, as “minha senhora” (madam).³

The Constitution approved here on 2 April 1976 forbids, in Article 13, favouring or disadvantaging anyone on grounds of sex, and gives spouses, in Article 36, equal rights and duties.¹⁵ The Civil Code had to be revised so that it no longer made the husband the “head of household”.¹⁶