Every year, in the weeks before Lent, Brazil comes to a standstill. The streets fill with glitter, the drums of samba schools echo from north to south, and millions of people — tourists and residents alike — immerse themselves in a celebration that is, at once, popular and sophisticated, chaotic and choreographed, sacred and profane. Brazilian Carnival is now recognized as one of the greatest cultural spectacles on the planet. But where did it all come from? How did a festival of European origin, with medieval roots, transform into this tropical explosion that the entire world admires?
The answer is long, rich, and full of surprises. The history of Carnival in Brazil is, in essence, the history of the country itself: a turbulent and creative encounter of African, European, and Indigenous cultures that, over centuries, mixed, clashed, negotiated, and ultimately produced something entirely new. To understand today’s celebration, we must go back to the beginning — long before the bleachers of the Sambadrome, before the electric trios, even before samba itself.
If you enjoy discovering historical facts that seem unbelievable but are completely true, you’ll love diving into this story. It’s also worth checking out our selection of surprising historical facts that really happened to expand your perspective on the past even further.
From the streets of Lisbon to the streets of Rio: the European origins
The word “carnival” has a disputed origin among scholars. One of the most accepted theories points to medieval Latin carne vale, which means approximately “farewell to meat” — a reference to the period of abstinence during Christian Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday. Another hypothesis links the term to the Italian carnevale, with the same meaning. In any case, the festival was born in Christian Europe as a period of permitted excess before the Lenten fast.
In Portugal, the tradition that came to colonial Brazil was called Entrudo — and it had nothing glamorous about it. Entrudo was essentially a popular and violent celebration: people threw water, flour, eggs, mud, and all manner of dirty liquids at each other in the streets. It was a period of social inversion, where hierarchies were temporarily suspended and chaos reigned. The play was physical, loud, and often dangerous.
With colonization, Entrudo landed in Brazil as early as the sixteenth century and quickly became popular — especially among enslaved people and the poorer population, who found in the celebration one of the rare moments of some expressive freedom. Colonial and later imperial authorities tried to ban Entrudo several times without success. The celebration was too deeply rooted in everyday life.
The Zé Pereira and the turn of the nineteenth century
The second half of the nineteenth century brought different European winds to Brazilian Carnival, this time from France. The urban elites of Rio de Janeiro — then the capital of the Empire — began to draw inspiration from Parisian and Venetian masked balls, creating closed, elegant, and perfumed celebrations, far removed from the dirt of Entrudo.
It was in this context that the character of Zé Pereira emerged, around 1846: a Portuguese man named José Nogueira de Azevedo Paredes who allegedly took to the streets of Rio with a bass drum and percussion, making noise and enlivening the pre-Carnival season. The story has legendary overtones, but Zé Pereira became a symbol of a transition: Carnival was beginning to take over the streets in an organized manner, with music, percussion, and processions.
Around the same time, the first cordões and ranchos carnavalescos emerged — organized groups of revelers who paraded through the streets in costumes, with music and allegorical floats. The ranchos, in particular, are considered one of the direct embryos of future samba schools. They already featured a prominent figure (the flag bearer), a thematic narrative, and their own music.
The arrival of samba and the construction of national identity
The early twentieth century was the most decisive period for the formation of Carnival as we know it today. It was during this time that samba emerged as an urban musical genre in Rio de Janeiro, especially in the Black communities of the hills and central regions of the city.
The most commonly cited symbolic milestone by historians is the year 1917, when “Pelo Telefone,” credited to Ernesto dos Santos, known as Donga, was registered as the first commercially recorded samba in Brazil. The authorship of the song was — and still is — disputed, which already reveals something about the collective and communal nature from which samba emerged.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, samba was progressively accepted by the middle classes and the media — especially by radio, which exploded in Brazil during this era. Composers such as Noel Rosa, Cartola, and Pixinguinha helped to refine the genre and bring it to broader audiences.
It was also during this period that samba schools were born. Deixa Falar, founded in 1928 in the Estácio neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, is often pointed to as the first samba school in history. In 1932, the first official samba school parade was held in Rio, sponsored by the newspaper Mundo Sportivo. From then on, the parades grew in organization, size, and sophistication.
This was no accident, as this process took place during the Vargas Era (1930–1945), when the federal government had great interest in promoting a unified national identity. Samba — previously associated with roguery and marginality — was gradually embraced as a symbol of the “Brazilian people.” This relationship between Carnival and state power is a rich and complex theme, full of tensions that historians continue to debate.
The Sambadrome and the age of grand spectacles
For decades, the samba school parades in Rio took place on different avenues throughout the city, with the public standing on sidewalks or behind ropes. The infrastructure was improvised and the space often insufficient.
Everything changed in 1984, when the Sambadrome of Marquês de Sapucaí was inaugurated in Rio de Janeiro — designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer at the request of then-governor Leonel Brizola. The samba runway transformed the parade into an arena spectacle, with bleachers, private boxes, tickets, and national and international television transmission. Rio’s Carnival definitively became a global cultural product.
The Sambadrome also changed the internal dynamics of the schools, which began to invest increasingly higher sums in allegorical floats, costumes, and technology. Today, the largest schools in Rio mobilize million-dollar budgets for each parade, with allegorical floats reaching up to 8 meters in height and costumes produced by specialized ateliers.
Salvador, Recife, and Olinda: Carnival is plural
A common mistake is to think of Brazilian Carnival as synonymous with Rio’s parade. The celebration is, in fact, profoundly diverse in each region of the country.
Salvador has the most popular Carnival in the world in terms of number of participants — at least that’s what the city has historically claimed. The Bahian model is radically different from Rio’s: instead of runway parades, there are electric trios, trucks with stage and powerful sound systems that travel through the city’s circuits while crowds follow in the streets. The electric trio was invented in 1950 by Dodô and Osmar, two Bahian musicians who installed amplifiers in a 1929 Ford and took to the city streets playing. The simple idea revolutionized northeastern Carnival.
In Recife and Olinda, Carnival has its own flavor: it is the realm of frevo and maracatu. Frevo, declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2012, is an acrobatic and frenetic dance, danced with colorful umbrellas. Maracatu, with its deep Afro-Brazilian roots, is one of the oldest and most powerful expressions of Black culture in the Northeast.
Other regional forms also deserve mention:
- The bumba meu boi from Maranhão, which mixes Indigenous, African, and European elements
- The blocos de sujo and fanfarras from Minas Gerais and São Paulo
- The bois-bumbás of Parintins, in the Amazon, which take place in June but have a structure similar to carnival parades
- The street blocos that, in recent decades, have resurged with force in all Brazilian capitals
Carnival, Black culture, and memory
It is impossible to tell the story of Carnival without speaking of the central and irreplaceable contribution of the Black Brazilian population. From Entrudo practiced by enslaved people to ranchos, from samba born in the yards and courtyards of Black communities to samba schools — the celebration that Brazil showcases to the world was built, in large part, by people who for centuries were marginalized, criminalized, and excluded from the formal structures of power.
Samba itself was persecuted by police in the early twentieth century. Gatherings in candomblé terreiros were forcibly dispersed. Percussion instruments were banned in certain periods. The history of Carnival is also a history of cultural resistance — of a people who kept their traditions alive despite repression.
Recognizing this origin is not merely a question of historical justice: it is understanding where the strength, creativity, and emotional depth of a celebration comes from — a celebration that, at least for a few days, makes Brazil stop and celebrate what is most alive in its culture.
Conclusion: a festival in constant reinvention
Brazilian Carnival arrived in 2026 as one of the most watched and discussed celebrations in the world, broadcast live to dozens of countries, studied by sociologists and anthropologists, sought after as a high-value tourist destination. But its strength does not lie in the bleachers of the Sambadrome or the million-dollar trios of Salvador — it lies in this celebration’s ability to reinvent itself with each generation, absorbing new influences without losing its essence.
From the dirty Entrudo of colonial streets to the choreographed parade of thousands of people, from the acrobatic frevo of Olinda to the beat of the maracatus, Carnival is a mirror of Brazil: contradictory, exuberant, unequal, creative, and, above all, irrepressible. Knowing its history is to understand a little better who we are — and why, every year, regardless of everything, the revelry continues.
