Círio de Nazaré

What it is

Belém sits at the mouth of the Amazon, and on the second Sunday of October it holds the Círio de Nazaré: a procession for Our Lady of Nazareth that fills the city with a crowd counted in the millions and ranks among the largest Catholic gatherings on earth.

The center of it is a small wooden image of the Virgin, carried in a flower-covered glass carriage called the berlinda. Around it, filling the streets from wall to wall, is the city. The procession covers only a few miles and it takes most of the morning, because that many people cannot move faster than that.

Understand what you are looking at before you decide whether to go. This is not a festival with a religious theme, the way Carnival is. This is the single most important day of the year for millions of people in Pará, and most of them are there because of something that happened in their own family.

The rope

The image most people remember is the corda: a long rope carried on either side of the carriage, gripped by pilgrims for the entire route.

Holding it is a promessa, a promise kept. Someone was sick and recovered. Someone came home. Someone got what they asked for. In return, they hold the rope from the start to the end, in the heat, in a crush of bodies, often barefoot, sometimes for hours, and people come out of it bruised and in tears and glad.

That is what you are watching. If you take one thing from this page, take that.

It is a season, not a day

The Sunday procession is the summit, but the Círio is a fortnight.

The Saturday before brings a river procession, with a flotilla of boats escorting the image across the water into the city, which in a place shaped by rivers is exactly the right way to arrive. Saturday evening brings a second procession through the city at night, and it is many locals’ favorite. There are processions for motorcyclists and for children, and a closing procession two weeks later.

Then there is the part visitors rarely hear about, which is lunch. When the Sunday procession ends, families sit down together for the Almoço do Círio, and it is Thanksgiving: the same relatives, the same dishes, every year. In Belém those dishes are duck in tucupi and maniçoba, and they are unlike anything else in Brazilian cooking.

How to be there properly

Dress the way you would for a church, not the way you would for a beach. Belém is hot and you will still see people covered.

Watch from the route, from a balcony, or from further back in the crowd. Do not work your way toward the rope for a photograph. The people on it are doing something that costs them.

Photograph the scene, not faces in prayer, and ask when you can. Nobody objects to visitors being there. Being treated as a backdrop is a different thing.

If you want to understand the day, go to the basilica during the week before, when it is quieter, and look at the room where people leave offerings for promises kept.

Should you plan a trip around it

Belém is a long way from the Brazil most first-time visitors have in mind. It is not a beach city. It is hot and humid year round, and October is inside the rainy stretch, which in Belém means a heavy downpour most afternoons that people set their day around.

So this is not the festival to bolt onto a two-week Rio, Iguaçu and coast itinerary. It costs you days at both ends.

Where it earns its place is a trip where the north is the point. Belém plus the Amazon. Belém plus São Luís and the Lençóis Maranhenses. Or a trip built around food, because Ver-o-Peso market and the ingredients that come out of that river are a real reason to fly somewhere, Círio or no Círio.

If you are the kind of traveler who has stood in a crowd at something that mattered to the people in it and found it moved you more than any monument, put this on the list. It is one of the few things in Brazil I would call unforgettable without hesitating.