Port anD the Douro uP to Date 47coming to believe in a political rather than military solution to the long-running colonial
wars. There was little resistance and much jubilation in the streets when the Armed Forces
Movement (MFA) brought an abrupt end to fifty years of totalitarian rule. The coup d’état
itself was good-natured with very little bloodletting and, in the immediate aftermath, life
continued much as it had before. Oporto was calm on the day of the coup and the British
played their customary game of cricket on the Saturday after the military had seized power.
At first it seemed as though the new military junta would do no more than tinker
with the existing institutions. All Salazar’s Grémios were abolished, the Grémio dos
Exportadores do Vinho do Porto being replaced by a voluntary Port Wine Exporters’
Association (AEVP). Otherwise, apart from the inevitable saneamento (purge of figures
from the old regime), business continued as usual in the months following the coup.
However, the 1974 vintage took place against a political showdown when President
António Spinola – who had only taken office five months before – resigned, warning
the Portuguese people of a ‘new slavery’. Throughout the winter of 1974 and 1975 left-
wingers in the armed forces, many of whom had learnt their politics from the African
liberation movements, made a concerted bid for power. It culminated in the so-called
verão quente (hot summer) of July and August 1975 when the ostensibly democratic
revolution ran completely out of control.
Throughout this volatile period, Portuguese firms were more vulnerable than foreign
companies, most of which managed to keep a low profile. Much of the economy fell into
state ownership when the banks and insurance companies were nationalised in March
- Two Port shippers were seized. Borges & Irmão was nationalised along with the
bank of the same name, and Royal Oporto was taken over by its own workforce. In April
1975 the employees of Sogrape at Avintes near Vila Nova de Gaia set the fire hoses on
an approaching revolutionary mob to prevent them from taking control. The following
month, remote and often conservative villages in the Douro and Trás-os-Montes were
subject to a programme of Dinamização Cultural (‘Cultural Dynamisation’) by the
military. This was described by General Morais da Silva, Air Force Chief of Staff, as a
campaign where ‘the military will work, spade in hand, alongside the local populace
to win their confidence and, having raised the blockades, make them take part in the
revolutionary process’. At the same time Committee of Management was appointed to
oversee the Casa do Douro, led by Captain Pardal, a member of the MFA. This was not
well received by the generally conservative growers in the region, who took to the streets
of Régua to protest, and the military were eventually forced to climb down.
When in August 1975 Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho (one of the members of the ruling
military triumvirate) returned from Cuba and implied that there might be a need to
round up all Portugal’s counter-revolutionaries and extinguish them in the Lisbon bull
ring, many leading Portuguese families decided it was time to pack up and leave. Fully
expecting to have to abandon the country in a hurry, one Port shipper decided to send
all his family photograph albums to England just to retain a record of life in Oporto and
the Douro. The owner of one Douro quinta told me how he and his young family fled
the country to escape arrest, crossing the River Guadiana to Spain in the dead of night