Rio at Carnival, and the parade of the winners

Carnival is celebrated across Brazil, and across much of the Catholic world, in the days before Lent, the forty days of fasting before Easter. Because Easter moves, so does Carnival, which falls in February or early March. In Rio de Janeiro, it has grown into one of the largest celebrations on earth, with music, costume and dancing filling the city for several days.

There are really two Carnivals in Rio. One is in the streets, where hundreds of street parties, called blocos, gather crowds behind a band or a sound truck, often in fancy dress, from early morning in neighbourhoods across the city. The other is the parade of the samba schools in the Sambadrome, a spectacle unlike any other.

The samba schools

The samba schools are not schools in the usual sense. They are community organisations, most of them rooted in the working-class neighbourhoods and hillside favelas of the city, and they spend the whole year preparing for Carnival. Each chooses a theme, writes a samba song to tell its story, and designs the floats and costumes. Its members rehearse for months, and the workshops where the floats are built are busy all year.

Samba itself grew up in Rio in the early twentieth century, drawing on the rhythms brought to Brazil by enslaved Africans, and the first samba schools were formed in the late 1920s. The parade became the centre of Carnival over the following decades.

The street Carnival is open to everyone. Blocos range from a few dozen people with a small band in a neighbourhood square to vast crowds following a sound truck along the seafront. Many have their own traditions, songs and costumes, and some, such as the long-established Cordão da Bola Preta, draw enormous numbers. For many residents of Rio, this, not the Sambadrome, is the real Carnival.

Rio's samba schools also hold rehearsals in their own halls in the weeks before Carnival, and these are often open to visitors, a chance to hear the drummers and see the school preparing its samba.

The Sambadrome

The Sambadrome is a purpose-built parade avenue, designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1984, lined with stands for tens of thousands of spectators. On the main nights of Carnival, the leading schools parade one after another through the night, each taking more than an hour to pass. A school may parade with thousands of members, in sections of matching costumes, with enormous, elaborate floats, and with its drum section, the bateria, of hundreds of drummers driving the rhythm. The flag-bearer and her partner dance in front, and the whole school sings its samba as it goes.

The parade is a competition. Judges score each school on its music, its costumes, its floats, its theme, its dancing and its harmony, and the results are announced after Carnival with great excitement across the city.

The parade of the winners

On the Saturday after Carnival, the top schools return to the Sambadrome for the Champions' Parade. The schools parade in full costume, with their floats and their drummers, but without the tension of the judging. For many visitors, this parade is a good way to see the samba schools at their best, and the atmosphere is often more relaxed.

Just You's Chile, Argentina and Brazil Rio Carnival Winners' Parade, fourteen nights for solo travellers, is timed for this parade. It includes Santiago in Chile, Mendoza and Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Iguaçu Falls and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes, is the centre of Argentina's wine country, known above all for its Malbec. Buenos Aires is a city of grand boulevards, cafés and tango.

Just You's version with a Rio add-on, sixteen nights, includes the same places, with more time in Rio. Between the parades, there is the city to see: Sugarloaf Mountain, reached by cable car, the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the summit of Corcovado, and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.

Carnival is hot, crowded and exhausting, and the parades go on late into the night. Check the dates of the tours against the Carnival calendar for the year you plan to travel, since they move each year. Keep valuables to a minimum in the crowds, drink plenty of water, and pace yourself.