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.

The image by the stream

The devotion to Our Lady of Nazareth came from Portugal and was brought to Pará by Jesuit priests in the seventeenth century. According to the best-known account, in 1700 a man of Portuguese and Indigenous descent named Plácido found a small, worn wooden statue of the Virgin, about 28 centimetres tall, by the Murutucu stream in Belém. He took it home, but the statue kept returning to the place where he had found it. Even when the governor had it moved to the chapel of the palace under guard, it reappeared at Plácido’s hut. The Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth now stands on that spot.

The Círio has been held in Belém every year since 1793. The word círio comes from the Latin for a large candle; the procession was originally held by candlelight in the evening, and moved to the morning in 1854.

The rope and the mantle

The main procession carries the image from the cathedral to the sanctuary. The statue rides in a carriage, the berlinda, pulled by a rope that was introduced in 1855, when the streets flooded, and officially adopted in 1868. Today it is 400 metres long, and thousands of men and women compete for a place on it along the route. Each year the image is given a new mantle designed around the theme of the festival. Because Our Lady of Nazareth is the patron saint of sailors, boats also play a part, and a small boat that once carried the statue has accompanied the procession since 1885.

UNESCO, which inscribed the Círio in 2013, describes how almost the entire city takes part and how it brings together Amazonian culture and cuisine and local crafts such as toys carved from palm wood. The festival was also declared intangible heritage of Brazil in 2004.

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