Graceful as gondolas
Graceful as gondolas, moliceiros race near Aveiro. Portugal's mastery of sailing reached its height when explorers ventured to India, the Orient, and the New World in sturdy caravels. Europe's foremost geographers and astronomers traded ideas at a school founded by Prince Henry the Navigator about 1418. Today a youth hostel occupies the school's reconstructed buildings on Sagres Point. The political pendulum swung free when more than 40 years of conservative dictatorship ended in an almost bloodless coup in 1974. Eleven governments formed and fell in the next five years. Since the revolution the annual May 1 parade attracts celebrators from all sectors of Portugal's left wing to Lisbon's Alameda D. Afonso Henrique’s. At a fair in the fruitful Alentejo farming region, the hammer and sickle hangs over a guest at a poorly attended Communist Party hospitality tent. Many predicted a Communist regime for a nation suffering from the lowest per capita income in Western Europe, mounting unemployment, and rapacious inflation, but Portugal has swung toward moderate government under a socialist constitution adopted in 1976. Revolution also spelled an end to the empire. When Angola, Mozambique, and other colonies gained freedom, Portugal was suddenly engulfed by half a million retornados—refugees who found asylum in the motherland. Faced with Lisbon's housing shortage, squatters still find shelter in illegal shacks tolerated by a beleaguered government.