Brazil’s festivals run from the samba schools of Rio’s carnival to the Amazon, where a city follows a small image of the Virgin on a 400-metre rope and two ox associations fight it out in blue and red — all rooted in Portuguese, African and Indigenous traditions.
Photo: Ministério da Cultura, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Many of Brazil’s great festivals combine Catholic devotion with African, Indigenous and Portuguese traditions. Carnival arrived with Portuguese colonists and took on the samba rhythms introduced by Afro-Brazilians; the Círio de Nazaré brings together faith with Amazonian culture and cuisine; and the bumba-meu-boi, with its death and resurrection of an ox, grew out of the lives of enslaved people and rural workers.
Two of the festivals in this atlas are on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: the Círio de Nazaré, inscribed in 2013, and the Cultural Complex of Bumba-meu-boi from Maranhão, inscribed in 2019.
On the second Sunday of October about two million people fill the streets of Belém, in the state of Pará, to follow a small wooden image of Our Lady of Nazareth — thousands of them straining to hold a 400-metre rope — in the largest Catholic event in Brazil.
October 11, 2026Calculated
Carnaval do Rio de Janeiro
In the days before Lent, Rio de Janeiro holds what is considered the world’s largest carnival — two million people a day on the streets, and a contest of samba schools that parade through the Sambadrome with floats, drummers and thousands of dancers.
February 5 – 9, 2027Calculated
Bumba-meu-boi
Through June the arraiais of São Luís fill with embroidered oxen, drums and wooden clappers as almost a hundred bumba-meu-boi groups act out, in song and dance, the death and resurrection of an ox — a folk play born among the poor of colonial Brazil.
June 13 – 30, 2027Calculated
Festival Folclórico de Parintins
In a town in the Brazilian Amazon, two rival ox associations — blue Caprichoso and red Garantido — turn the story of the bumba-meu-boi into three nights of arena spectacle, with giant sets, drums, Amazonian legends and a whole town divided by colour.
June 25 – 27, 2027Estimated