Brazilian Carnaval - Rio de Janeiro

Brazil Samba Carnival 2012

Ιt’s party time in Rio! As people from around the world don their headdresses and masks in readiness for a week of Carnival madness, we’re getting in on the action with a week’s worth of Carnival flavour.

Rio's lavish carnival is one of the world's most famous. Scores of spectacular floats surrounded by thousands and thousands of dancers, singers, and drummers parade through the enormous Samb-dromo Stadium dressed in elaborate costumes 

(or, quite often, with absolutely no costume.) 

It is an epic event televised around the world. The origin of Brazil's carnival goes back to

 a Portuguese pre-lent festivity called "entrudo",

 a chaotic event where participants threw mud, water, and food at each other in a street event that often led to riots (an event quite similar to today's Andean carnival - see Venezuelan section of this booklet). Rio's first masquerade carnival ball (set to polkas and waltzes) was in 1840. Carnival street parades followed a decade later with horse drawn floats and military bands. The sound closely associated with the Brazilian carnival, the samba, wasn't part of carnival until 1917. The samba is a mix of Angolan semba, European polka, African batuques, with touches of Cuban habanera and other styles. What we now know as samba is a result of the arrival of black Brazilians (primarily from Bahia) to the impoverished slums or favelas surrounding Rio following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888.

Today the carnival is organized by the escolas de samba (samba schools). They first appeared in 1928. Much more than musical groups, they are in fact, neighborhood associations that provide a variety of community needs (such as educational and health care resources) in a country with grinding poverty and no social safety net.