Lisbon, 25 April 1974, twenty past midnight. From the Renascença radio station come the notes of a song, Grândola, Vila Morena. It is the signal everyone is waiting for to begin the military operations that within a very short time will end the Salazar dictatorship and open a new age for the country and for Europe. The senior officers loyal to the regime are arrested; strategic points such as the airport and the political prison are occupied; the head of government Marcelo Caetano gives himself up to the rebels in the afternoon, and at twenty past eleven at night the law dissolving the National Assembly and the Council of State is approved. In less than twenty-four hours the country begins a revolutionary process that will lead to freedom and democracy, with the people pouring into the streets beside the soldiers. It was a swift, peaceful, mass revolution — the only one in Europe after the Second World War — an event that drew in and moved more than one generation of citizens, political activists and journalists, who saw in Portugal, in its ability to shake off decades of dictatorship and come out of the colonial war, the chance to think of and build a different life. The carnation revolution was a great collective event, a turning point for the country, its reforms and its social life.