Carnaval

It is Carnaval season in Brazil.

Carnaval in Brazil is an annual festival held the Friday afternoon before Ash Wednesday at noon, which marks the beginning of Lent, the forty-day period before Easter.  Carnaval is the most popular holiday in Brazil and has become an event of huge proportions. 

The country unifies completely for almost a week and festivities are intense, day and night, mainly in coastal cities.  

Rio de Janeiro's carnaval alone drew 6 million people in 2018, with 1.5 million being travelers from inside and outside Brazil.  Rio's world according to Guinness World carnival is the largest single carnaval parade in the Records.  

Meanwhile, the carnaval of São Paulo is the largest street carnaval celebration by number of participants.

In the southeastern cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Vitória, huge organized parades are led by samba schools. Those official parades are meant to be watched by the public, while minor parades (blocos) allowing public participation can be found in those as well as other cities, like Belo Horizonte, also in the southeastern region.

These parades are contests between the samba schools and are taken as seriously as any football (soccer) game in Brazil.

We are in Guaruja and not Sao Paulo where crowds (blocos) are marching through our neighborhood of Pinheiros.