RTP studios in Lumiar

The Lumiar studios of Rádio Televisão Portuguesa stood here. The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) included RTP in its operations plan, to stop the regime from using it and to put it at the service of the Movement.¹ At 02:50 on 25 April 1974, a column of about a hundred men commanded by Captain Teófilo Bento left the barracks of the Military Administration Practical School (EPAM), on the same avenue.² They entered the studios, disarmed the PSP guards and set up defensive positions; at 03:59, the captain telephoned the Command Post: “We have just occupied MONACO without incident”. At around 04:00, PSP and DGS men appeared around the building, and only moved off after bursts of G3 fire into the air.¹

Television was slow to speak. According to Jofre Alves’s chronology, Captain Alarcão held up the Monsanto transmitter until about 18:30, and at 18:40 Fialho Gouveia read an MFA statement on RTP.⁶ At 01:00 on 26 April, the National Salvation Junta left the command post at Pontinha for here, escorted by Major Jaime Neves’s armoured vehicles.³ At around 01:30, in a live colour broadcast from these studios, General António de Spínola presented the Junta to the country, flanked by Costa Gomes, Rosa Coutinho, Pinheiro de Azevedo, Silvério Marques and Galvão de Melo; General Diogo Neto was in Mozambique. In a statement of about three minutes, he promised “full expression to all currents of opinion” and the election, by direct suffrage, of a Constituent Assembly and of the President of the Republic.⁴

On 25 November 1975, EPAM troops occupied the studios again. At 18:00, the school’s second-in-command, Captain Duran Clemente, called on television for popular mobilisation; at 21:10, as he was explaining the reasons for the action, the broadcast was suddenly cut and resumed from the Porto studios, with a Danny Kaye musical programme.⁵