The Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a
festival held every year before Lent and considered the biggest carnival in the
world with 2 million people per day on the streets. The first festivals of Rio
date back to 1723. The typical Rio carnival parade is filled with revelers,
floats, and adornments from numerous samba schools which are located in Rio. A
samba school is composed of a collaboration of local neighbors that want to
attend carnival together, with some kind of regional, geographical common
background.
The Carnival is a European import
beginning in the 1600s as a version of Europe's grand pre-Lent balls. It was
practiced by the Portuguese elite behind closed mansion doors, with Brazil's
black African population excluded. But the recipe for these masked celebrations,
danced to the rhythm of the time, the polka, travelled out into the
"favela" shanty towns and Carnival really began. By the 20th century
these individual community parties developed into a humble cousin of the
fully-blown carnival we see today complete with music of its very own: samba.
Foreign visitors number some 700,000
each year. There are 30 samba schools with thousands of members. Each school is
fronted by a queen and led by hundreds of drummers and a cavalcade of floats.
And this is just the official parade. Bandstands for public parties and
Carnival balls are found across the city, along with more off-beat parties in
clubs and venues in Rio's Centre and beyond.
Rio's global image is so closely
associated with Carnival that the two things are almost synonymous. Everything
from the tourist industry to episodes of The Simpsons have found it hard to
separate the two entities. Usually this is a huge boost for Rio's economy but
this year the global credit crisis has even taken the shine off Carnival.
Materials for the parades have shot up in price and costume suppliers have gone
bust.
More important, the big-name
sponsors and donating companies, such as Petrobras, the state-owned oil
company, aren't able to contribute costing the parade millions of pounds. The
Rio state government will donate several million, and tourist revenues, though
likely to be down on previous years, also hotels are expecting a 20 percent
drop in occupancy, that will still be significant. Carnival goers are expected
to inject $521 million into the city's economy, up from $510 million last year.
