The coup began on 23 February 1981 when Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, along with 200 armed Civil Guard officers, stormed the Congress of Deputies chamber in Madrid during a vote to swear in Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as President of the Government.

The officers held the parliamentarians and ministers hostage for 18 hours, during which the King denounced the coup in a public television broadcast, calling for rule of law and the democratic government to continue.

This was a result of Pita da Veiga's disagreement with the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) on 9 April 1977, following the Atocha massacre by neo-fascist terrorists.

Key events saw the resignation of the Minister of Culture, Manuel Clavero on 15 January; the restructuring of the government on 3 May; the motion of no confidence against Adolfo Suárez moved by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) between 28 May and 30 May; the resignation on 22 July of the vice-president, Fernando Abril Martorell, which produced a new reshuffle in September; and the election in October of Miguel Herrero Rodríguez de Miñón, alternative candidate of the official bid for president of the centrist parliamentary group promoted by Suárez.

[4] On 1 February, the "Almendros Collective" published an openly insurgent article in the far-right newspaper El Alcázar,[5] which was the mouthpiece of the Búnker hardliners, including Carlos Arias Navarro, Luis Carrero Blanco's successor as prime minister, and the leader of the francoist party Fuerza Nueva, Blas Piñar.

At 18:23, as Socialist-party deputy Manuel Núñez Encabo was standing up to cast his vote, 200 Guardia Civil agents led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero and armed with submachine guns, burst into congressional chambers.

As the highest-ranking military official present, Army General (and Deputy Prime Minister) Gutiérrez Mellado refused to comply, confronting Tejero and ordering him to stand down and hand over the weapon.

The captain of the Guardia Civil, Jesús Muñecas Aguilar [es], strode to the Speaker's platform, demanded silence and announced that all those present were to wait for the arrival of "the competent military authority."

As he tried to enter the Palace of Zarzuela, the royal residence, Armada offered the monarch a trade-off: the king would head a new "government of salvation" that would replace the democratically elected one in the hopes of appeasing Tejero and his forces and thereby avoiding a return to the full military dictatorship the conspirators were demanding.

[16] Shortly after Tejero took control of the Congress, Jaime Milans del Bosch, Captain General of the III Military Region, executed his part of the coup in Valencia.

Deploying 2,000 men and fifty tanks from his Motorized Division as well as troops from the port of Valencia onto the streets and into the city center, they occupied the Town Hall (Ayuntamiento) and the Valencian judicial court building (Las cortes valencianas).

By 19:00, Valencian radio stations began broadcasting the state of emergency declared by Milans del Bosch, who was hoping to convince others to endorse his military action.

The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, will not tolerate, in any degree whatsoever, the actions or behavior of anyone attempting, through use of force, to interrupt the democratic process of the Constitution, which the Spanish People approved by vote in referendum.From that moment on, the coup was understood to be a failure.

Deputy Javier Solana stated that when he saw Tejero reading a special edition of the El País newspaper brought in by General Sáenz de Santamaría, which vehemently condemned the hostage situation inside the Congress, he knew that the coup had failed.

[citation needed] Juan García Carrés, ex-leader of the Sindicato Vertical (the only legal trade union organisation in Francoist Spain), was the only civilian to be convicted.

The bloodless yet apparently chaotic unravelling of the coup, the plethora of unanswered questions as to its unfolding, the staunch monarchist allegiance of two main conspirators (Armada and Milans del Bosch), and the King's lengthy absence before he finally made a late-night public television address have fueled skepticism and conspiracy theories during the Campamento trial and have remained active ever since.

In essence, this version of events alleges that the coup itself was orchestrated by the Spanish Secret Services in connivance with the King and the Royal House as well as representatives of the major political parties and mainstream media, among others.

[24] The second objective of the purported "soft" coup was a consequence of the former: to hurry still-toddling Spanish public institutions into fulfilling the convergence criteria the nation was being groomed for, namely NATO and EEC membership and the consolidation of an effectively bipartisan and ideologically moderate parliamentary monarchy.

[20] According to the rationale behind the theory, this objective required both purging the armed forces of its most reactionary elements and frightening the common voter into accepting the monarchy and the two-party system as the institutional "default position".

[22][23][25] A major clique or sub-group among the instigators of this alleged coup was the so-called Colonels' group, headed by former SECED chief José Ignacio San Martín.

[21][23] According to these theories, Prime Minister Suárez got wind of Operation Armada long in advance, hence his sudden resignation in order to avoid it—given that the coup was to occur during the motion of no confidence in his government, scheduled to take place some weeks later.

The plan went forward in spite of Suárez's resignation, but Tejero's failure to understand its ramifications, his guileless belief that he was at the heart of a hardcore coup plot, the media field-day prompted by his violent entrance in congressional chambers (and his crass, uncouth demeanor and language, which was captured by microphones and cameras in the building and later ridiculed by the press), and his refusal to accept the multi-partisan government proposed by Armada, resulted in the simultaneous aborting of the "hard" and the "soft" coup plots by those who had planned them.

[23] Former CESID Special Operations chief José Luis Cortina Prieto, one of the three military officers acquitted during the trial, plays a ubiquitous role in these theories, some of which[21][26][27] place him as a major power player within the conspiracy as well as the man responsible for coalescing all the different coup plots into one and later neutralizing them simultaneously.

Cortina, who graduated from the Zaragoza Academy in the same cohort as the King,[26] had been appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence services during the Carrero administration[28] and would later assist his brother in creating the Gabinete de Orientación y Documentación S. A.

From my father, who was in Estoril (and was also very surprised to be able to contact me by phone), from my two sisters in Madrid, and from friendly heads of State who encouraged me to resist.Sabino Fernández Campo, chief of the Royal House, expunged this from the Spanish edition.