Carnival in Brazil

What Carnival actually is

Carnival is the last stretch before Lent, so the date moves with Easter every year. In practice the country takes the Monday and Tuesday off, most of it takes the Friday too, and things get properly going the weekend before.

The mistake Americans make is thinking of it as one event with one location, the way you would think about Mardi Gras. It is not. Every city does a different thing, and the differences are not cosmetic. Choosing the wrong one for the people you are traveling with is the way this goes badly.

Rio, and what a ticket actually buys you

Rio is two events running at the same time.

The first is the Sambadrome: a purpose-built concrete parade strip where the top samba schools compete on consecutive nights, each with thousands of costumed members and floats several stories tall. It is a judged competition, not a show for tourists, and it runs late into the night. You sit in a grandstand, a box or a private suite, depending on what you bought.

The second is the blocos: free street parties, hundreds of them, spread across the whole city from early morning to evening for a couple of weeks. Some are twenty people and a drum. Some close an entire neighborhood. This is the part that visitors talk about afterward, and it costs nothing.

If you only do one, do the blocos. If you do both, take the parade as one big night and plan to sleep the next morning.

Salvador

Salvador is the largest carnival in the country and the most physical. It is built around trios elétricos, semi trucks stacked with speakers and a band on the roof, moving slowly along a circuit with an enormous crowd walking behind them for hours.

You are either inside a bloco, wearing that bloco’s shirt and moving inside a roped area with security, or you are outside the rope in the free crowd. Both are legitimate. Neither involves sitting down. It is loud, hot, packed and wonderful, and I would not put a couple who wanted a calm week anywhere near it.

Recife and Olinda, which is what I would actually suggest

Olinda is a small colonial town on a hill next to Recife, and its carnival is free, in daylight, and on foot. Giant papier-mâché puppets come down narrow streets to frevo, a fast brass music with its own umbrella-twirling dance, and to maracatu, which comes out of Afro-Brazilian tradition and carries real weight. Nobody is selling you a ticket. You walk out of your guesthouse into it.

Recife next door runs the enormous Saturday morning block downtown and a serious program of its own.

For a couple in their forties or fifties who want to experience Carnival rather than survive it, this is the version I would send them to. The hills are steep and the sun is brutal, and that is the whole downside.

Planning around it

Carnival is Brazilian high summer and the single busiest week of the Brazilian year. Domestic flights, hotels and guesthouses go early, minimum stays appear, and rates in the carnival cities move to a different level. Book it far ahead or do not book it at all.

Two honest notes. First, plenty of Brazilians leave the carnival cities that week and go somewhere quiet, which tells you something. Second, if Carnival is not the reason you are coming, do not try to thread it. Come in a different month and get a better trip for less money.

If you do come for it, give it its own block of days, then go somewhere still afterward. Ash Wednesday in Brazil is a very quiet day, and it is the right time to be on a boat somewhere.