Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CARNAVAL WARNING
Wherever you go at Carnaval, take care of your possessions: it is high season for
pickpockets
and thieves
. Warnings about specific destinations are given in the text, but the basic advice is
if you don't need it, don't take it with you.
just outside Recife - Carnaval has become a mass
event, involving seemingly the entire populations of
the cities and drawing visitors from all over the world.
When exactly Carnaval begins depends on the
ecclesiastical calendar
: it starts at midnight of
the Friday before Ash Wednesday and ends on the
Tuesday night, though effectively people start
partying on Friday afternoon - over four days of
continuous, determined celebration. It usually
happens in February, although very occasionally it
can be early March. In effect, the entire period
from Christmas is a kind of run-up to Carnaval.
People start working on costumes, songs are
composed and rehearsals staged in school
playgrounds and backyards, so that Carnaval
comes as a culmination rather than a sudden
burst of excitement and colour.
During the couple of weekends immediately
before Carnaval proper, there are
carnival balls
(
bailes carnavalescos
), which get pretty wild. Don't
expect to find many things open or to get much
done in the week before Carnaval, or the week after
it, when the country takes a few days off to shake
off its enormous collective hangover. During
Carnaval itself, shops open briefly on Monday and
Tuesday mornings, but banks and o
ces stay
closed. Domestic airlines, local and inter-city buses
run a Sunday service during the period.
Salvador
is, in many ways, the antithesis of Rio,
with several focuses around the old city centre: the
parade is only one of a number of things going on,
and people follow parading schools and the
trio
elétrico
, groups playing on top of trucks wired for
sound. Samba is only one of several types of music
being played; indeed, if it's music you're interested
in, Salvador is the best place to hear and see it.
Olinda
, in a magical colonial setting just outside
Recife, has a character all its own, less frantic than
Rio and Salvador; musically, it's dominated by
frevo
,
the fast, whirling beat of Pernambuco, and is in
some ways the most distinctive visually with its
bonecos
, large papier-mâché figures that are the
centrepiece of the Olinda street parades.
Some places you would expect to be large
enough to have an impressive Carnaval are in fact
notoriously bad at it: cities in this category are São
Paulo, Brasília and Belo Horizonte. On the other
hand, there are also places that have much better
Carnavals than you would imagine: the one in
Belém
is very distinctive, with Amazonian food and
the rhythms of the
carimbó
, and
Fortaleza
also has
a good reputation. The South, usually written off by
most people as far as Carnaval is concerned, has
major events in Florianópolis, primarily aimed at
attracting Argentine and São Paulo tourists, and the
smaller but more distinctive Carnaval in Laguna. For
full details of the events, music and happenings at
each of the main Carnavals, see the relevant
sections of the Guide.
Locations
The most familiar and most spectacular Carnaval is
in
Rio
, dominated by samba and the parade of
samba schools down the enormous concrete
expanse of the gloriously named
Sambódromo
.
One of the world's great sights, and televised live to
the whole country, Rio's Carnaval has its critics. It is
certainly less participatory than Olinda or Salvador,
with people crammed into grandstands watching,
rather than down following the schools.
Other festivals
The third week in June has
festas juninas
, geared
mainly towards children, who dress up in straw hats
and checked shirts, and release paper balloons with
candles attached (to provide the hot air), causing
anything from a fright to a major conflagration when
they land. O
cial celebrations, with military parades
and patriotic speeches, take place on September 7
(Independence Day) and November 15, the anniver-
sary of the declaration of the Republic.
In towns and rural areas, you may well stumble
across a
dia de festa
, the day of the local patron
saint, a very simple event in which the image of the
saint is paraded through the town with a band and
RIO CARNAVAL DATES
2015
Feb 14-17
2016
Feb 6-9
2017
Feb 25-28
2018
Feb 10-13
