a parade in tribute to black women rewarded at the Rio de Janeiro carnival

This year, several schools have decided to pay tribute to Afro-Brazilian heroes or indigenous peoples.

Honor to black women. The Viradouro samba school was crowned champion of the Rio de Janeiro carnival on Wednesday February 14, thanks to a parade on the strength of black women. The theme of the parade was the cult of a sacred serpent venerated by the Mino warriors, who defended the Dahomey kingdom, where Benin is located today, from where many slaves were sent by force to Brazil.

Viradouro at the same time paid tribute to Afro-Brazilian women, in a country where racism persists, and where 56% of the population is black or mixed race. Second place in the ranking goes to the Imperatriz Leopoldinense school, last year’s champion, which evoked the theme of luck and chance through the story of a gypsy girl.

Third title for Viradouro

Viradouro led the race from start to finish, while the jurors’ scores were rattled off one by one for more than an hour, during a ceremony broadcast live by TV Globo, Brazil’s most watched channel. . She was the last of the 12 groups to parade, when the sun began to rise, after two nights of a grandiose spectacle at the Sambodrome, a 70,000-seat venue created 40 years ago by the architect Oscar Niemeyer.

Olha esse carro da Viradouro, Brasil! 😍😍 #Globeleza pic.twitter.com/aspZKjXgxY

— TV Globo 📺 (@tvglobo) February 13, 2024

Viradouro thus won his third title (after those of 1997 and 2020), and was greeted by an explosion of joy in Niteroi, a suburban town of Rio where this school founded in 1946 is located.

This year, several schools had decided to pay tribute to Afro-Brazilian heroes or indigenous peoples, like Salgueiro, ranked fourth with a parade on the tragedy of the Yanomami, who are facing a serious humanitarian crisis caused by incursions by gold miners illegal in the Amazon.