The Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a world famous festival held before Lent every year and considered the biggest carnival in the world with two million people per day on the streets. The first festivals of Rio date back to 1723. The carnival parade is filled with people and floats from various samba schools. A samba school can either be an actual school or just a collaboration of local neighbours that want to attend carnival. The purpose of carnival is for samba schools to compete with fellow rival schools; this competition is the climax of the whole carnival festival. Each school chooses a theme to try and portray in their entry. The samba schools work to build the best floats and costumes to represent their themes, and to include original themed music from their band.
Some of the important roles include the porta-bandeira and mestre-sala. The porta-bandeira is a very important lady who is in charge of the samba school flag, including making sure to not allow the flag to roll.
The Samba School flag holder is accompanied by the mestre-sala, who is supposed to draw everyone's attention to "his queen", the porta-bandeira. Floatees, who are also important, are the people who populate the floats, also known as destaques.
The floatees have the most luxurious and expensive costumes that can be extremely heavy. Along with all the floatees is one main floatee that is located at the top of each float. The main destaque dances and sings for the entire time that the float is on the runway. One other aspect that is mandatory is the presence of the ala das baianas. This is a wing of the samba school entry that includes at least 100 females only.
These women along with many other people do not ride on the floats as many others do, instead they are passistas, the people who belong to the samba school that do the marching alongside and between the floats.
As the parade is taking place in the Sambodromo (the stadium specifically built for the Carnival samba school competition and its live broadcast from Rio de Janeiro), the balls and galas are being held in the Copacabana Palace Hotel and beach.
Copacabana Palace Hotel Copacabana Beach
Street festivals are very common during carnival and are highly populated by the locals. Elegance and extravagance are usually left behind, but music and dancing are still extremely common. Anyone is allowed to participate in the street festivals. Bandas and bondos are very familiar with the street carnival especially because it takes nothing to join in on the fun except to jump in. One of the most well known bandas of Rio is Banda de Ipanema. Banda de Ipanema was first created in 1965 and is known as Rio's most irreverent street band.
