Opened on the last day of April at the San Francisco cultural complex in Cáceres, Spain (Complejo Cultural San Francisco), the exhibition ‘Los muros de la reivindicación ciudadana: España y Portugal en los albores de la democracia’ (‘The walls of citizen demand: Spain and Portugal at the dawn of democracy’) recovers urban mural art that decorated Spanish streets in the mid-1970s. Curated by IHA – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST researcher Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro with Emanuele Treglia and Giulia Quaggio from the Complutense University of Madrid, at the invitation of the Spanish Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, this travelling exhibition stays in Cáceres until May 20^th.

Messages of great international relevance at that time can be found, such as those derived from Pinochet’s coup d’état against Allende’s Chile in 1973; the Carnation Revolution against Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal on 25 April 1974, or the Sandinista Revolution in Somoza’s Nicaragua in 1979.

At the opening of the exhibition, which commemorates 50 years of freedom in Spain, the President of the Cáceres Provincial Council, Miguel Ángel Morales, expressed the local government’s commitment to continue working to make what was one of the darkest times in Spain known, to make the yearning for freedom and democracy known, expressed in the streets, on the walls, in many cases, by the hand of Portugal, ‘to whom we owe a lot, we owe their example in the Carnation Revolution”.