The Viradouro samba school was crowned champion of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival 2024, Wednesday February 14, after its superb parade on the strength of black women through the myth of a sacred snake from Benin. A third title (after those of 1997 and 2020) greeted by an explosion of joy in Niteroi, a suburban town of Rio where this school founded in 1946 is located. Viradouro led the race from start to finish, while the scores jurors were screened one by one for more than an hour, during a ceremony broadcast live by TV Globo, the most watched channel in Brazil. She was the last of the 12 groups to parade when the sun began to rise on Tuesday, after two nights of a grandiose spectacle at the Sambodrome, a 70,000-seat venue created 40 years ago by architect Oscar Niemeyer.
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The great champion of this edition of the carnival made an impression from the start of the parade, when an enormous articulated vermillion-colored snake crawled as if by magic between the dancers. 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 wanted to pay tribute to Afro-Brazilian women, in a country still hit hard by racism, even if 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. This year, several schools have decided to pay tribute to Afro-Brazilian heroes or indigenous peoples, like Salgueiro, ranked fourth with a parade on the drama of the Yanomami, who are facing a serious humanitarian crisis caused by incursions of gold miners illegal in the Amazon.