At four twenty-six in the morning of April 25, 1974, the confident voice of Joaquim Furtado reads, into the microphones of Rádio Clube Português, and to the country, the first communiqué of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). At this time Rui Félix Amado I was in Coimbra, sleeping. She was three years old and would soon have to wake up to go with her parents to Lisbon. The father had a work meeting and the mother took advantage of the trip to take her son to the Zoo.
The testimony of Rui Félix Amado, now 53 years old, is the sixth of the “Lisbon that Dawns” series, who borrowed the title from one of the most beautiful songs about Lisbon, written by Sérgio Godinho. Because that’s what happened that day. Lisbon dawned and made the whole country dawn.
Watch the sixth episode here:
Early that morning, Rui Félix Amado, then three years old, remembers little. He has an idea of silence, emptiness, absence of movement, “as if it were a Sunday morning”.
The father had an important work meeting at the headquarters of the company he worked for, located on Rua da Madalena. He parked the car in Campo das Cebolas and Rui and his mother took the subway to Jardim Zoológico.
When no one opened the door for him, after several unsuccessful attempts, realizing that something strange was going to happen, Rui’s father went to pick up his wife and son from the Zoo. And it was on the way back, on the road between Rossio and Campo das Cebolas, that Rui’s first conscious memories were experienced.
The silence was interrupted by a volley of shots, which Rui today assumes was the shooting in Largo do Carmo, against the GNR barracks. His parents’ fright, his calm and his refuge in a shoe store on Rua da Prata, where a group of people gathered around a radio.
Vivid memories that marked him forever.
Having been at the center of the events of the revolution that changed Portugal and overthrowing the dictatorship, at the age of three, and having April 25, 1974 as my first conscious memory, made everything else relative. “I met two Nobel Prize winners, I contacted very important people from different areas and I got used to seeing it as normal and that was why I had the 25th of April as my first memory”, says Rui Amado, whose work and civic intervention led him to develop great affinities with the Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP) and with Timor.
The family heritage is right-wing. The grandfather, a combatant in the First World War, was a monarchist and Salazarist, the father, not identifying with the dictatorship and having seen the 25th of April as a positive event, did not support many of the changes brought about by the PREC (Revolutionary Process in Progress), which led him, in democracy, and his wife, to vote for the CDS.
The 53-year-old jurist, himself “right-wing and viscerally liberal”, makes a point of saying that he, however, has left-wing people among his best friends. Without active political involvement, he focuses on civic and cultural intervention and goes down Av. Sá da Bandeira, in Coimbra, every year to celebrate the 25th of April.
“Although the revolution is a heritage of the left, the 25th of April belongs to everyone, it belonged to everyone”, says Rui Félix Amado, who at the age of three experienced it very closely.
“Lisbon that dawns”: the Lisbon Message series on the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April
At 10:55 pm on April 24, 1974, Emissores Associados de Lisboa had broadcast the song And After Goodbye, in the voice of Paulo de Carvalho. She was given the password. At 00:20 on April 25th, on Rádio Renascença, Zeca Afonso was heard singing the Grândola Vila Morena It was the signal. The revolution that would overturn 48 years of dictatorship was underway.
And although at 4:26 am the first statement from the MFA called on the Portuguese to stay at home, in the city of Lisbon, there were many who did not stay. What made them leave? How was that morning? What did they see on the streets and in each other’s faces? What environment did the city live in?
That’s what we tried to get from the past and make present in this series about the first hours of freedom on that initial day 50 years ago.
April 25, 1974.
REVIEW THE OTHER EPISODES OF THE “LISBOA QUE AMANHECE” SERIES HERE:
Catarina Pires
She is a journalist and mother of João and Rita. She was born 49 years ago, in Chiado, at Hospital Ordem Terceira, and considers it an injustice that her parents took her away from what she is sure is their territory, to raise her in Paço de Arcos, a land that, to be honest, , he loves it, especially because of the river reaching the sea right outside his house. At 30, the injustice was temporarily corrected – she lived in Bairro Alto –, but life – and house prices – took her again, this time to the other shore. From Almada, always a sliver of Lisbon, the central vertex (if such a thing exists) of its affective-geographical triangle.
Inês Leote
She was born in Lisbon, but returned to the Algarve when she was six days old and only returned to the city she loved 18 years later to study. She is now 23, she likes photographing people and emotions and the streets are her comfort, especially those in Lisbon which she always wanted hers to have. She doesn’t see the photograph without the word and she doesn’t see herself without both. She is a photojournalist and responsible for social media at Mensagem.
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Tags: Zoo Baixa Rui experienced revolution age
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