Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1)

We're in Rio, aka Carnival city. I knew Carnaval was a big deal but had no idea of its cultural, social and economic significance until we visited a samba school.

Picture the Rio carnival parade. No, it's not just a week-long party. Surprise! This is actually a fierce competition between rival 'teams', called samba schools. Like football teams, samba schools are ranked in first, second and third leagues or divisions. There are 12 samba schools in the top division. The 12 first division samba schools compete on the first two nights of Carnaval.

Six schools compete each night between 10 pm and 6 am. (The heat!) Each samba school consists of up to 3000 members including dancers, percussionists, stewards and other artists. Behind the scenes, there can be a thousand more who make floats (4 to 8 per school) and costumes, organise the choreography, etc. Judging is intense and is viewed live on TV.

We visited the Grande Rio samba school, which won the 2022 competition. These costumes are from previous years; the costumes behind glass were worn in 2022.

The samba schools are year-long enterprises, located in large 'factories', big warehouses in an industrial park. Each school has engineers, tradesmen, upholsterers, seamstresses, painters, builders. Each year's theme, music and story for Carnival is muito top secret, ultra secreto. We were not allowed to take photos of any of the work going on for 2023. I did take this one before we received instructions, but I feel okay sharing it because the photo doesn't actually show what they were creating. (Trumpets. Lots of them.)

What really impressed me was the level of community involvement. Each samba school represents an area of Rio, a neighbourhood, where everyone is involved all year. There's lots of money involved, so people are paid to design, build, sew or create in some way. Children go to the samba school after school to help build or practise their moves. There is a kids' competition as well, which is an incubator for the samba industry.

The Rio de Janeiro state government provides funding to each samba school, which is then supplemented by commercial sponsors. Like a football team, the more successful the samba school, the more money they get. We're talking millions of US dollars here.

Have a look at these designs from the 2022 Carnival. They show how many individual costumes have to be made: there may be (say) 200 people in Group 2 so the costume for Group 2 will need to be made 200 times. Participants pay for their costume, and after the competition, they own it. One of our guides participated in four years of Carnaval. She said eventually she didn't have any more storage space for her huge costumes, so had to give them away.

On the night of the competition, the samba school performs in the parade for exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes. In this time they (up to 3000 people!) have to move from one end of the arena to the other. Time penalties apply if the school is too fast or too slow. The Carnival arena is a long, straight arena, 700 metres long, with banks of seating on either side of this long avenue. It holds around 100,000 people and tickets to the event are hot items. Our guide told us that the best place to sit was Sector 9 --- this may be useful information if we or you attend Carnaval. It starts this year on 17 February. Just saying.

Here's Gabriella from Grande Rio giving us a demo of how to samba.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ef199f_08b6920f9a384ab2b73d674f29ceaac9/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

From the sublime to the ridiculous. The school dressed us up in samba costumes. Did we do the samba? Of course we did. But we didn't look like Gabriella.

Brazil has a population of 215 million people. It's the 7th most populous country in the world. The influence of the Pope through the centuries has been huge; today, Brazil has the largest Catholic population of any country of the world. On a walking tour in downtown Rio, we popped in to the Mosteiro de São Bento, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1590. It's perched on a hill so has nice views of downtown Rio, but I was most charmed by the putti on the walls. Some of them have a very adult leer ....

In contrast to the gilded Rococo style in this church, the Catholic cathedral --- the Cathedral of St Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro --- is quite brutal in comparison. It was built in the late 1960s in the style of Mayan pyramids and seats 15,000 people. With people standing, it can hold 25,000. Honestly, does this look like a cathedral to you?

It's lovely, but very different, inside. Couldn't see a single putto, though.

One last building. The Museum of Tomorrow --- Museu do Amanhã --- has been built near the docks on reclaimed land. It was created for the 2016 Olympic Games, which Rio hosted. It's a science museum focusing on sustainability and the future of the planet. Lots of innovative digital exhibits, but overall we liked the building itself.

We did go to an exhibition on the Amazon in the museum, which consisted of beautiful photographs with lots of information.

And here's a photo of the museum from the ocean. Taken from our ship just before we left Rio, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Next: More Rio! Including Copacabana, Sugarloaf and Christ the Redeemer.