By the time I arrived for the Parade of Champions at the Sambodrome, I had spent nearly two weeks in Brazil. I had acclimated to the heat and humidity and the throngs along the beachfront. I had become accustomed to locals and visitors alike treating the sidewalks, stores, and restaurants of Copacabana as a simple extension of the beach. No shirt? No shoes? No problem. People were here for sun, surf, and samba; they did not need much in the way of clothing for that. It was Carnival and this was Rio de Janeiro.

It seemed as if the entire city had become a boardwalk, one made of Portuguese brick and bordered by high-rises. Shirtless men stood in line at grocery stores. Breasts bulged from tiny bikini tops at restaurant tables. Ordering a coffee was a lesson in the popularity of the Brazilian wax job.

As I left my Airbnb for the nearby Metro station, I felt both familiar and anticipatory. My visit a week earlier to Centro turned into a sort of backstage tour of Carnival. I stumbled across the performers’ entrance busy with the fully costumed and those hauling enormous loop skirts and headdresses of feather and shell. Nearby was the staging area for the giant carros—the enormous floats. It looked like Disneyland had been stretched out and lined up along a runway. Here was Brazil’s curated view of itself, ready for another close up. It was enchanting.

Travel by Rio’s Merro is great. Opened in March 1979 after nine years of construction, its stations are bright, floors are clean; it is safe. One fare takes you anywhere with a tap of your credit card or phone. Tonight, unlike the crush of the previous Saturday, there is room to breathe.

While signage could be better, my only complaint about the Metro is the harsh electronic tone which screams a warning just before the doors close. It is ear-shattering. The first time it happened, I almost jumped. By my third trip, I was prepared for the sound if not the navigation. There are just four lines, and they appear to be branches sharing the same trunk, so I boarded the first train. Was it the 1 or the 4? I was never sure, but I arrived without a problem.

Emerging from underground, I join the flow of celebrants toward the Sambódromo. I pass barriers of concrete and orange plastic, chain‑link fences, buildings without signs, and stretches of asphalt that look more like a parking lot than the threshold to a grand stadium.

Nothing about the area signals monumentality. There are improvised stands selling grilled meat, vendors under plastic tarps selling beer, and hawkers praying for rain and selling plastic ponchos. (There are few places in Rio where there isn’t someone selling something.)

Rio’s city government announced plans in late 2024 to transform the area—Praça Onze—into a year-round cultural destination. There are plans for parks and museums. I hope the ambition is reached.

While the Sambódromo is not sited in a way that would make a marketer happy—odd because Rio is filled with such sites—it is historically well placed. This area was known in the early 20th century as Pequena África—Little Africa.

It was to this community that a free African woman arrived from Bahia to change how Brazil would be viewed around the world. Tia Ciata (Hilária Batista de Almeida, 1854–1924), was a Candomblé priestess and street food vendor. Her house was the site of gatherings where European salon music played in the front room and samba in the back. In Tia Ciat’s house, musicians including Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos and Mauro de Almeida composed “Pelo Telefone,” the first samba to be commercially recorded in 1917.

A decade later, in 1928, musicians from the Estácio de Sá neighborhood—dockworkers, sex workers, street hustlers, mostly people of color—founded Deixa Falar, widely regarded as the first escola de samba. The term “school” was both aspirational and strategic. It was a proclamation of respectability and, as one early participant put it, a plea to authorities “to march without being beaten up by the police.”

By 1930 there were seven schools active in the city, all rooted in hillside favelas and working‑class North Zone neighborhoods. From the start they served as social clubs, mutual‑aid networks, and year‑round cultural centers for Afro‑Brazilian identity, roles they still play today.

What a visitor sees today is very different from that original community. In 1941, under President Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime, the government bulldozed more than 500 homes and other buildings, displacing thousands and wiping out the historic center of Black culture and early samba in Rio. The planned Praça Onze Maravilha project would be the first serious attempt to honor and partially restore that lost legacy.

The African Soul of Carnival: Samba, Candomblé, and Resistance

Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. That happened in 1888 after more than 350 years of the slave trade. Nearly half of the estimated twelve million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken to Brazil.

Forbidden from practicing their traditional religions, enslaved Africans in Brazil developed Candomblé, a syncretic spiritual system that blended Yoruba, Bantu, and Fon deities with the iconography of Catholic saints. This act of spiritual camouflage was a form of profound cultural resistance and it did not stop there. Candomblé’s rhythms— rolling drums, call-and-response chanting, ecstatic dance—was the African bedrock upon which Brazilian samba was built. At its origin, it was a ritual Candomblé dance performed to drums and handclaps. It has come a long way. Nonetheless, the ala das baianas—the wing of women dressed as Bahian priestesses (loop skirts, beads, headdress) –is an obligatory element of every samba school parade today to honor these midwives of samba.

Getting In: Border Crossing

The Sambódromo Marquês de Sapucaí is a blunt object: a straight concrete avenue with steep stands on both sides. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer, it opened in 1984. With a capacity of 90,000 spectators, it creates a runway for spectacle. Tonight, samba schools will enter at one end, march for a half mile, and exit under a big open arch, the Praça da Apoteose. During the year, the route carries regular traffic, and the classrooms nestled beneath the stands are abuzz. It did double duty during the 2004 Olymoics. During Carnival, the Sambadrome becomes a canyon of sound, color, dance and the machinery of fantasy.

While I could not see the Sambodrome until I was practically inside, getting in was easy. Securing the ticket, however, took some effort. The online system asked for more proof of my identity than some border crossings. Upload passport photo. Upload the back page. Take a selfie holding the passport. Confirm again. The result was a QR code and the real worry that I’d somehow erase it before tonight. With my Sambodrome “visa” in hand—and $260 less in my wallet—I was soon climbing a couple of stories, pausing to make sure that I hadn’t entered the service area of the stadium. In sector 4, the Sambodrome was definitely showing its age.

Sector 4 was packed and I continued climbing the grandstand to find my place. The Parade of Champions was about to start.

Once again I benefited from the kindness of Brazilians. When I put my shoulder bag down on the ground, a plastic bag was offered to me. If I looked hungry, a bag of cashews was presented. Thirsty? “Yes, água com gás will be fine.” Soon we were taking selfies.

The Parade of Champions brings back the six highest‑scoring samba schools from the previous weekend. And while each is there to entertain, they also come with a historical point of view to get across, and a sociological comment or two.

All schools participating in Carnival follow a distinct enredo. This is its narrative concept or storyline, the guiding idea that everything else follows. The lyrics of the theme song, the design of costumes, the look of the huge floats and the choreography of each wing (or group—dancers, drummers, etc.)

The 6th-place school parading at 10 pm shortly after I arrived. The year’s winning school left the Sambadrome at 7 am the next morning. What unfolded was the most colorful, creative, attention-grabbing—and long—history lesson of my life.

Mangueira: Afro‑Brazilian Roots and a Black Amazon

Estação Primeira de Mangueira—founded 1928, Morro da Mangueira

Mangueira was founded in Morro da Mangueira, in Rio’s North Zone. It is a Black, working‑class hillside community. In Brazil’s 2022 census, 45.3% of the population self‑identified as pardo (mixed race), 10.2% as preto (Black), and 43.5% as white—a demographic reality reflected in Rio’s favelas, where the heaviest concentrations of pardos and pretos live.

Mangueira quickly became one of Rio’s archetypal samba “nations,” known for its green‑and‑pink colors, melodic sambas, and enredos that frame Brazilian history from the vantage of Afro‑Brazilian culture and the poor.

While I had photographed several carros the previous weekend, I had not seen them in motion until now. The word float does not do them justice. What rolls past at the Sambódromo are multi‑story sound stages. Each carries dozens of performers and sculptures and engines and hydraulics to power it all. These towering fantasy land yachts on wheels turn this 700‑meter straightaway into a walking encyclopedia of Brazilian popular culture narrated not by those who study it but by those who live it.

In 2026, Mangueira’s theme, “Mestre Sacaca do Encanto Tucuju – O Guardião da Amazônia Negra,” centered on Mestre Sacaca (Raimundo dos Santos Souza, 1926–1999), a healer and community leader from Macapá, in equatorial Brazil. What followed was a trip to the Amazon. There were boats packed with performers in Amazon‑inspired skirts, headwraps, and beadwork; river creatures curling along the base; dancers carrying herbs and small bundles echoing Sacaca’s practice. The concrete corridor in the center of Rio became the far-away mighty rushing Amazon River.

Imperatriz Leopoldinense: Culture on a Censored Stage

Imperatriz Leopoldinense—founded 1959, Ramos

Imperatriz Leopoldinense emerged in 1959 in the Ramos neighborhood of Rio. It took its name from Empress Maria Leopoldina of Austria (1797–1826), the Habsburg archduchess who married Dom Pedro and became Brazil’s first empress. She was a key figure in Brazil’s independence from Portugal, urging Dom Pedro to “stay” in Brazil when Lisbon ordered his return and backing the 1822 break with the Portuguese Crown. As a samba school, Imperatriz has often drawn on this imperial imagery in its colors, symbols, and parade themes, blending monarchy and popular Carnival culture together.

It was the Portuguese, of course, who brought Carnival to Brazil. Celebrated throughout Catholic Europe as a pre‑Lent festival, it took the form of Entrudo in Portugal. It included street games, water fights, flour dousing, and throwing of objects of varying sizes and densities that could leave injuries.

Over the 1980s and 90s, this samba school developed a reputation for elegant, historically themed parades, often focusing on monarchs, artists, and writers.

Its 2026 enredo, “Camaleônico,” honored Ney Matogrosso (b. 1941), whose career spans Brazil’s military dictatorship and its return to democracy. For decades, Carnival and popular music navigated state censorship and sponsorship. President Getúlio Vargas promoted and funded samba schools in theb1930sHe saw them and Rio’s parades as instruments of and tools for national identity. At the same time, his regime tightened control over their content. This continued under the later rule of the generals.

Schools like Imperatriz Leopoldinense learned to use metaphor, double meanings, and visual excess to say things that could not be said plainly. With its LGBT sensibility this school did it quite well and with style. The parade featured elaborate costumes and theatrical staging extending this tradition of subversive performance. Seventy years after his death by suicide under military pressure, this school turns the very spectacle that Vargas helped institutionalize—and turn into the embodiment of Brazilianness—into a vehicle for irony, critique, and queer reinvention.

Acadêmicos do Salgueiro: Favela, Slavery, and Black History in Public

Acadêmicos do Salgueiro—founded 1953, Morro do Salgueiro

Acadêmicos do Salgueiro was created in 1953 in Morro do Salgueiro, one of Rio’s earliest favelas. These now infamous communities were built by poor and working-class people, often the formerly enslaved, who couldn’t afford formal housing let alone purchase the land under it. What began as necessity became culture.

A favela is usually started on a hillside. Today they are dense, improvised worlds of cinder block and sheet metal. They grow upward as residents expand where and how they can. Narrow lanes, rigged electrical wires, rooftop water tanks, satellite dishes. And samba schools. Today, roughly a quarter of Rio’s residents live in favelas—informal neighborhoods that are home to about 1.5 million people across the city.

I visited the Santa Marta favela on a guided tour. It has 7000 residents and three police stations. The police never leave their stations as men in sandals and tank tops —armed with machine guns — patrol the narrow alleyways. I was told that this was a quite normal show of force by the Red Command, and nothing to be alarmed about. (I learned this only after I booked the tour) The Red Command received some fame when it allowed Micheal Jackson to record a music video in the neighborhood in 1996. My guide—a dental school student who has lived in Santa Marta all of her life—told me that “nobody steals here.” I believed her.

The word favela itself has a precise and violent origin. The favela (Cnidoscolus quercifolius) is a thorny, drought-resistant shrub native to northeastern Brazil. It was in such territory in 1896–97 that the Brazilian army fought a brutal war against the millenarian settlement of Canudos in Bahia. The soldiers who survived that campaign were promised land and back pay by the government upon their return to Rio. They received neither. Stranded and unpaid, they occupied a bare hillside near the old Ministry of War. They named it Morro da Favela after the shrub that had covered their far away killing fields. Every similar hillside settlement that followed inherited it.

From the late 1950s onward, the Salgueiro school has focused on powerful percussion while placing enslaved and Black resistance figures at the center of Carnival.

Unidos de Vila Isabel: Neighborhood, Popular Art, and Layers of City

Unidos de Vila Isabel—founded 1946, Vila Isabel

Unidos de Vila Isabel was founded on 4 April 1946 in the Vila Isabel neighborhood by Antonio Fernandes da Silveira (“China”). He and others turned a local football group into a samba school.

The founding of samba schools in favelas and working‑class neighborhoods helped transform Carnival from largely unregulated street mayhem into organized parades with rehearsed music, elaborate costumes, and themed processions. In the 1930s and 40s, as politicians and cultural elites searched for a unifying sense of “Brazilianness,” these state-supported schools turned samba into a national symbol—celebrating a mixed, Afro‑diasporic popular culture that could represent the country as a whole.

In 2026, Vila Isabel’s carros passed Sector 4 almost at eye level as moving towers echoing both Rio’s physical form—hillside houses, high‑rises, stacked lives—and the way Carnival arranged bodies from a neighborhood into a single structure. The enredo about the painter and musician Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966) tied those images back to a specific sambista‑painter whose art depicted “Little Africa” and other popular Rio scenes.

Vila Isabel brought a whole neighborhood on wheels along with an imagined Africa to the Sambódromo.

Beija‑Flor de Nilópolis: Outskirts, Luxury, and Afro‑Religious Worlds

G.R.E.S. Beija‑Flor de Nilópolis—founded 1948, Nilópolis

Beija‑Flor de Nilópolis was born in the Baixada Fluminense, formally founded as a samba school in 1953 after starting as a bloco in 1948. From these humble beginnings, it is now one of the most successful schools in Rio, with 15 Special Group titles. The 2026 enredo, “Bembé,” featured the Bembé do Mercado of Santo Amaro, Bahia.

It was in Bahia that Europeans first saw the land of Brazil, mistakenly thought to be an island. When Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived on the South American coast in 1500, he called it Ilha de Vera Cruz—Island of the True Cross—and then Terra de Santa Cruz, Land of the Holy Cross, to correct his mistake.

As it happened, the coastal forests of Bahia were full of a hardwood the Portuguese called pau-brasil—”ember wood.” This evocative name was inspired by the vivid blood-red sap that bled from the tree’s heartwood. This was made into a pigment and the pigment was used to dye cloth a vivid red. The red was much in fashion and trade for the wood became lucrative quickly. Soon sailors and merchants dropped the pious name for the more to-the-point Terra do Brasil, Land of Brazilwood.

After the Portuguese brought Entrudo to Brazil, this celebration rooted in Medieval Catholicism soon encountered the religion of Tia Ciata. The rhythms and dances of Candomblé and other Afro‑Brazilian religions found their place at Carnival and also continued independently.

The Bembé do Mercado was created by a West African priest, João de Obá, and his community on May 13, 1889, the day Brazil abolished slavery. It is considered the oldest public Candomblé ceremony in Brazil, held annually in Santo Amaro. It honors the orixás—African deities —with drumming, dances, offerings of sacred foods, and a procession to the sea with gifts for Iemanjá and Oxum, goddesses of the waters.

On this night—it was already early morning—multi‑story carros were followed by dancers in long white skirts, headwraps, and bead belts—the ceremonial dress of Candomblé practitioners. As much ritual as parade, Beija‑Flor celebrated Afro‑Brazilian spiritual worlds with a spectacle that honored religious piety as well as theatrical grandeur.

Unidos do Viradouro: Niterói’s Voice and the Sambista at the Center

Unidos do Viradouro—founded 1946, Niterói

Unidos do Viradouro was founded in 1946 in the Barreto neighborhood of Niterói, across the bay from Rio. It spent years competing in local carnivals before moving into Rio’s top divisions to win its first Special Group title in 1997.

Its 2026 theme, “Pra cima, Ciça!”, focused on Mestre Ciça (Moacyr da Silva Pinto, b. 1956). Ciça is a sambista who began as a passista and percussionist. He has spent nearly five decades across several schools, 38 of them as mestre de bateria. Ciça’s career parallels wider developments in Brazilian society, including its transformation from military dictatorship to BRICS nation. Ciça started his Carnival career during the authoritarian “economic miracle” of the 1970s and gained stature as Brazil democratized in the 1980s and 90s. He established a reputation as a living legend during the 2000s boom years—the time Brazil turned Carnival into a mass-media cultural export.

Today, the festival draws 65 million participants nationwide and generates an estimated $3.6 billion for the economy. Rio alone expected 8 million attendees this year with an economic impact of approximately $1 billion. International tourism during the Carnival period reached 300,000 foreign visitors—a 17% increase from 2025. TV Globo’s broadcast reached more than 190 countries across four continents. Live feeds from Rio de Janeiro were transmitted simultaneously to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia. The parade footage is at the forefront of Brazil’s soft power as a tolerant, fun-loving, creative force for good in the world.

Tonight, Ciça is being honored for his creativity and the professionalization of the parade into a global industry worth hundreds of millions in tourism and broadcasting. But Carnival functions as more than an economic engine: it serves as an active tool of Brazilian cultural diplomacy. Government agencies, embassies, and cultural institutions explicitly use Carnival-themed events abroad to promote soft power, strengthen bilateral relations, and position Brazil as a leader in cultural diversity.

By honoring Ciça, Viradouro makes explicit what had long been implicit: the working-class Afro-Brazilian artists who built modern samba are the same people who gave Brazil the cultural capital it uses to project soft power on the world stage.

On the avenue, Viradouro’s carros traced that trajectory—from older samba neighborhoods to Niterói—with wings dressed as Ciça at different ages and a final multi‑level “drum‑ship” packed with musicians. In a festival often used to celebrate emperors, generals, and abstract themes, Viradouro’s champion parade turned the spotlight onto the working musician and made a simple, historical argument: Carnival is, at its core, the accumulated life work of sambistas like Ciça.

Stepping Inside

I arrived in Brazil knowing three phrases in Portuguese: please, thank you, and I don’t understand. I soon learned that that was enough to be polite and lost at the same time. I heard more French, Italian, and German than Portuguese in those early days. After two months communicating in my poor Spanish, I was a little disoriented to be somewhere where communication was so hard. Not only that, the entire scene in Rio was so different. I saw couples, friend groups of various sizes, families in matching shirts. There were almost no solo travelers and no one alone who looked my age. The excitement of arriving in a new country hadn’t hit. My imagination and expectations failed to enlarge upon arrival in Rio as they usually do. I did not feel the kind of shared festival enthusiasm that was present in Cartagena or Pasto for their Carnival celebrations. Copacabana felt like thousands of small groups preparing for their own private party. I was definitely not on the guest list or even a plus-one.

That changed significantly a few days earlier on Tuesday in Ipanema. While stopping in front of the club Silêncio where a bloco had formed, I became a participant instead of an observer. This was thanks to the friendliness of Matheus, Luciano, Julia, and the rest of their friends, old and newly made. All local, young, and beautiful, they brought me into the joy of that street party with smiles, hugs and kisses. When I got back to my room that evening, I purchased my ticket for tonight.

I came to Rio’s Carnival as an outsider. But somehow, the warm smiles given to me by my Airbnb hosts, hooking up with a bloco in Ipanema, being cared for during the parade marathon, and finally being mesmerized by the sight of impossible moving stages and fantastical costumes, I found that I belonged. For more than a few hours, this strip of concrete became the only place in the world I wanted to be. The thousands of private parties that I first encountered dissolved into a celebration of all by all. And I was a guest of honor.

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