Spain, 1981 — military coup attempt
Event Summary
On 23 February 1981, in an event known in Spain as 23-F, right-wing Francoist officers of the Civil Guard and military attempted a coup to halt Spain's young democracy, five years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. At around 6:23 in the evening, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, at the head of some 200 armed Civil Guards, burst into the Congress of Deputies in Madrid and held the entire government and parliament hostage at gunpoint during the live televised investiture vote for a new prime minister. Simultaneously, General Jaime Milans del Bosch declared a state of emergency and sent tanks into the streets of Valencia.
The plotters expected King Juan Carlos to endorse a military government, but instead the King, as commander in chief, went on television in the early hours of 24 February in his uniform to denounce the coup and order the armed forces to uphold the constitution. Deprived of royal legitimacy and military support, the coup collapsed; Tejero surrendered the next day. The failure marked the last serious attempt to reverse Spanish democracy and consolidated the monarchy's legitimacy.
Films & Footage
Archival media is credited to its holding collection and license. Media sourcing policy →
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
How It Unfolded
Hand-coded by Coup Atlas from the sources on this page, using a fixed list of tactics. Only events we have read through carry this coding, so most records do not have it yet.
- Led by
- Military
- How long it took
- Under a day — resolved within 24 hours
- Attack on or seizure of the legislature
- Troop movements in the capital or key cities
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
23002231981- Albrecht/Koehler/Schutz (CAM) id
CAM-230-1981-02-23
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: Spain's democratic government survived the 23-F coup after King Juan Carlos denounced it on television.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
CSP
Wikpedia
New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →