The Carnation Revolution

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of April, a tile panel image of the "A Memória das Pedras" mural in Louriçal do Campo.

Most Portuguese lived a life marked by poverty, war and censorship. Opportunities were greater abroad, but emigration was a difficult process. Lack of schooling and economic means meant that many left the country clandestinely or "on the run". On the 50th anniversary of April 25, we remember those who sought a better life beyond the national territory.

Between cold and hunger, in October 1964, it took "23 days on foot" between the village of Louriçal de Campo, in Castelo Branco, and the French city of Lyon, for Manuel Dias Vaz to escape the dictatorship.

The Portuguese man paid "14 contos" - the value of "a yoke of cows" - for the journey, which he negotiated as secretly as possible because "in the villages there were constant denunciations, even within families".

Before arriving in France, the Portuguese man left his home village by cab at night to the village of Aranhas, in the municipality of Penamacor, from where he walked for four days to near Ciudad Rodrigo, in the Spanish province of Salamanca, where he spent another two days "waiting for a cattle truck" to take him to Vitoria, in the Basque Country, and then spent "eight, nine days" crossing the mountains on foot in a "terrible winter", with "30 centimeters of snow in the Pyrenees".

"It was fear, cold and at the same time, let's say, hunger. The smugglers gave us a bit of chocolate, a bit of bread and we drank water from the rivers. We spent two or three days on the mountain in an abandoned court, we had to burn the boards that were there to lay straw because it was so cold," he recalled, adding that the 'moment of happiness' was, on another day, when he saw a flock of sheep that allowed the group to drink milk and snuggle up in the warmth of the animals.

Like Manuel Dias Vaz, there were thousands of Portuguese who, between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s, "hopped" across borders to get to France, using smugglers to guide them, custodians to keep the money for the journey, transporters and canvassers for people willing to emigrate, "an enormous network", in the words of Marta Silva, a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.