After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 and the negotiated independence of Portugal's African territories in 1975, the settler population of Angola and Mozambique left en masse, most of it between the spring and autumn of 1975 as civil war took hold in Angola. The 1981 census recorded 505,078 arrivals, equivalent to about five per cent of Portugal's population at the time, though estimates run as high as one million because arrivals were incompletely registered and some subsequently emigrated onward to Brazil and South Africa. Many travelled by whatever means they could find, including small boats, and arrived having lost their property; the Portuguese state provided integration assistance with support from the United States, the Council of Europe and Sweden, housing thousands in requisitioned hotels, but paid no compensation for lost assets. The retornados included people of mixed and African descent as well as European settlers, and were received with considerable social suspicion in a country in political upheaval.
The collapse of Portuguese colonial rule and the wars that followed independence drove settler and mixed-race populations out of Angola and Mozambique to Portugal
Angola held roughly 330,000-350,000 Portuguese settlers in 1974 and Mozambique about 190,000, giving a combined settler population of roughly 525,000; Portugal's own count of registered retornados reached 505,078 by 1977 and estimates of total arrivals run to 500,000-800,000 including people from Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Timor.
There was no significant death toll associated with the return itself. Deaths occurred in the violence surrounding decolonisation in Angola in particular, but the sources cited here record dispossession and hardship rather than mass mortality among the retornados.
Portugal, Angola, Mozambique