A Brief History of Portugal:

 
Portugal has a long and “proud” history, though also several rather dark episodes/phases in it – enough to warrant this separate Portugal History chapter.
 
After the end of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula and the establishment of an independent state of Portugal in the 12th century, the country emerged in the 14th and 15th century as a mighty seafaring nation ringing in the so-called “Age of Discoveries”.
 
Beginning with the Atlantic and its islands of the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde, Portugal laid the groundwork for a global network of colonies and trading posts eventually spanning from South America (what was to become Brazil) and various African territories (especially today’s Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique) and into Asia, in particular with the outposts of Goa in India (taken over by India in 1961), East Timor on the Indonesian archipelago and Macau on the south coast of China. So little Portugal was a truly global imperial superpower back then, together with its immediate neighbour. In fact, a treaty of 1529 divided up large parts of the world between Portugal and Spain. Other colonialists soon joined the “Age of Discoveries”, however, especially Britain, France and the Netherlands, eventually taking over from Portugal as the main colonizing countries.
 
But those nations also adopted the sort of transatlantic slave trade established by the Portuguese. Especially black Africans were sent by force to the Portuguese possessions in what is today Brazil, and the other colonialists did the same with their African colonies transferring a massive enslaved workforce mostly to the plantations in the Americas, both north and south … and in particular the Caribbean (see under International Slavery Museum for more, and also cf. Curaçao, Montserrat, Cape Verde and Goree).
 
In the late 16th century Portugal entered a phase of Iberian Union, basically a takeover by Spain, which significantly diminished Portugal’s seafaring and colonial prowess.
 
In 1755 Lisbon and Portugal were struck by a massive earthquake (in the order of magnitude 7.7 or even 9) which levelled the capital city, caused widespread destruction, fires and also triggered a deadly tsunami. Tens of thousands of people were killed. It stands as one of the darkest days in the country’s entire history.
 
In the 19th century Portugal resisted Napoleon, though the Royal Family fled to Brazil, which accelerated its declaration of independence (in 1822) as it refused to be part of a joint monarchy with Portugal, as this was re-established in Europe.
 
In the early 20th century, following the assassination of the king and his heir in 1908, the monarchy gave way to the first Portuguese Republic in 1910, but the country was in deep financial doldrums. Its burden of debt came to the point that the state’s finances were threatened with being taken over by outside powers (e.g. Portugal’s old ally Britain). To the rescue in the late 1920s came a certain up-and-coming economist by the name of António de Oliveira Salazar. First as Finance Minister and then as Prime Minister and President of the Council of Ministers, Salazar managed to consolidate Portugal’s finances and establish a sound budgetary policy … and in the process he morphed more less into a de facto dictator, under the new concept of the Estado Nuovo (‘New State’) established during the period from 1931 to 1933.
 
Yet Salazar’s dictatorship was quite different from that of Italy’s fascists under Mussolini, Germany’s Nazis under Hitler or the new rule emerging in Spain under Franco with his victory in the Spanish Civil War. Salazar had a certain affinity with both Mussolini’s and Franco’s nationalism, but unlike these, or Hitler, Salazar was not an ideologue and he despised a party apparatus permeating all strands of society, as was being established especially in Nazi Germany. In fact, Salazar mistrusted political party politics as much as he disliked democracy as such. Instead he believed the best path for his country was to be led by a “paternalistic” and “corporatist” elite of experts with himself at the helm. And, unlike Franco, he did not seek too close an alliance with the Catholic Church either (despite having been trained in a Catholic university in Coimbra).
 
To his credit, Salazar also managed to keep Portugal out of WWII and persuaded Franco to pursue the same path for Spain, even though Franco had already enjoyed significant military assistance from both the Italian and Nazi German Air Forces during the Spanish Civil War (see under Guernica and Barcelona). Given Portugal’s strategically significant location on the edge of Europe and the Atlantic, this was no mean feat. What may have helped were Portugal’s traditional ties with Britain and the fact that the British Empire already had its established strategic outposts across the Mediterranean in Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and the Middle East, while at the same time having sufficient access to the Atlantic from the homeland (especially through the port of Liverpool).
 
Remarkably, not long after the end of WWII, Portugal also became one the founding members of NATO in 1949, despite Salazar’s mistrust of the USA and their views of democracy.
   
Moreover, Salazar shunned the sort of cult of personality and militaristic pomp that had characterized Franco, Mussolini, Hitler and a few other autocratic regimes’ leaders. He never wore a uniform and kept himself out of the limelight as much as possible, preferring to pull the strings of power out of public view in the seclusion of his Lisbon office, where he conducted a duty-oriented life as a workaholic (and mostly in celibacy).
 
However, Salazar was not exactly a “benign dictator”. His rule relied heavily on propaganda and a suppression of opposition, a free press and general freedom of speech. Resistance against his rule came primarily from communists but was brutally repressed, especially by the state secret police called PIDE (‘Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado’). Members of the opposition often found themselves in political prisons both in Lisbon (Aljube) and elsewhere, with the most significant jail established at Peniche Fort. Interrogations involving torture were common. Political prisoners were also sent to prison camps in the faraway colonies – see in particular Tarrafal in Cape Verde.
 
In 1958, a hopeful among the democratic opposition in Portugal, Humberto Delgado, failed to secure a possible majority in the presidential election due to a heavily rigged election set-up. Delgado went into exile but was then lured into an ambush where he was killed by the PIDE. This is one of the darkest stains on Salazar’s legacy.
 
Salazar’s downfall eventually came not so much from the resistance at home, though, but due to his unwillingness to let go of Portugal’s colonial empire. While other colonial powers, like Britain, the Netherlands and France had gradually released their old colonies in Africa and Asia into independence during the 1950s and 60s, Salazar remained stubborn in this regard – even though he never even once visited any of Portugal’s colonial outposts. By the second half of the 1960s, his position had become grotesquely out of step with the signs of the time, which Salazar refused to acknowledge, making him internationally ostracized.
 
In some of those colonies the Portuguese military found itself involved in bloody wars of independence led by local rebel armies, especially in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. While Portugal’s military was certainly guilty of various vile massacres and other human right abuses in the colonies, there was a growing discontent within the younger military commanding ranks for having to keep fighting these 'Colonial Wars' that did not seem to have a solution, strategy or a real point any longer.
 
In 1968, after almost 40 years in power, Salazar suffered a brain haemorrhage and fell into a coma. Not expected to recover, we was replaced as leader by Marcelo Caetano.
  
Salazar did regain consciousness, but his reign was over. He finally passed away in July 1970, at the age of 81. His was one of the longest-ruling dictatorial leaders in history.
 
Interestingly, even today, a majority of Portuguese would rank Salazar as one of the “greatest figures” in their country’s history, even ahead of legends like explorer Vasco da Gama. (This should not be overstated, though – similar things have happened in Russia with regard to Stalin, and I’m sure if you asked right-winger Italians today the equivalent question, Mussolini would score highly as well.)
 
If you want to learn more about the enigmatic man that was António Salazar, of whom indeed too little is known in most other countries, I can recommend the biography penned by British historian and Iberian expert Tom Gallagher, which is simply entitled “Salazar”, but comes with with the telling subtitle “The Dictator Who Refused to Die” (London: Hurst, 2020, 356 pages).
 
Salazar’s successor Caetano, while trying out some kinds of reform, followed his predecessor in clinging on to the Portuguese colonies, despite the bloody colonial wars. So he too hadn’t seen the signs of the time.
 
Yet on 25 April 1974 his time and that of the Estado Nuovo had come, when it was overthrown in the military coup that has become known as the “Carnation Revolution”. This name came about through some civilians giving carnations to the soldiers as the military coup was accompanied by a widespread non-violent civil resistance movement among the populace. 25 April has since been declared a national holiday and is referenced in many place names, not least in the renaming of Lisbon’s iconic Ponte Salazar bridge as Ponte 25 de Abril.
 
Following the Carnation Revolution, the PIDE was disbanded, political prisoners freed and the colonies released into independence one by one, including those that hadn’t actually fought an anti-colonial war, such as Cape Verde and East Timor. The only colonial territory Portugal kept hold on to for a while longer was Macau, which was not handed back to China until 1999 (shortly after the formerly British Hong Kong had seen the same move in 1997).
 
In the decades after the dictatorship, Portugal embarked upon a path not only back to democracy but also modernization and economic improvement. In 1986, Portugal joined the EEC, which then became the EU, and in 1999 it was amongst the first group of countries forming the “eurozone” by adopting the single currency (EUR).
 
Portugal has benefited from European integration massively, not least in terms of tourism. Having been kept behind for much of the 20th century, especially under Salazar, the country now is a modern and diverse society with a strong service industry and relatively stable politics (although new right-winger populists are making inroads here too, as in so many other European countries and beyond …).