brazil4tour.com - tourism in Brazil

The Carnival is a major popular festival in Brazil, with the carnival of Rio’s richest and well-known, attracting thousands of tourists and foreigners. Every year, at the time of Carnival, the city of Rio de Janeiro breathe for five days an enviable air of joy. Cariocas forget problems and obligations and surrender to the gigantic spectacle of dance and magic. The culmination of the festival is the parade of the panel on de Sapucaí, where various samba schools compete for the title of Carnival champion. Samba, bright, splendid costumes and beautiful women are the main ingredients of this great dispute.

Although started “officially” on Friday fat, the street carnival in Rio is already beginning in November when the samba schools in the city go to make so-called “technical test” in the Sambadrome. True shows the corner where the progress and pace are the main, these events have attracted the city’s population and surrounding areas to fill the stands, twists and sing with their schools. A true popular festival which takes more and more interest from tourists eager to attend and participate in a carnival essentially popular.

The date of the Carnival varies from year to year depending on the Passover. Usually the bash takes place between the end of February and early March. The official start of Carnival is always on a Saturday and end at noon on the Wednesday following, called “Wednesday’s Ashes”.However many people have already started the celebrations on Friday. It is much in Brazil that year formally begins only after the Carnival.

During most of the nineties, the carnival was reduced to parades of samba schools and the great dances in clubs. The popular and traditional street carnival “, where people play spontaneously without paying entry, had been abandoned. In recent years, however, this form of celebration is being recovered.

The Carnival has several possible sources that lead to thousands of years before Christ. The word carnival may have its origin in the Latin phrase “carrum novalis” used by the Romans to open their celebrations. Or perhaps the word “carnelevale” which means “farewell to meat” in Milanese dialect, a reference to the beginning of Christian Lent.