CARNAVAL D'OLINDA

Along with Recife, this is the most authentic outdoor carnival. It's also perhaps the most popular, because here there's no need to buy a t-shirt or any other type of admission - as is the case in Salvador and of course Rio de Janeiro, which are very commercial carnivals - to get close to the party. Everyone is out and about, in the streets of the old town and the Cidade Alta. Hundreds of groups, each with their own costume, provide the musical entertainment: frevo, troças, blocos, maracatus, caboclinhos and afoxés, all these traditions, the fruit of the mixing of white, black and indigenous populations, are represented. What makes the Olinda carnival unique is certainly the parade of giant dolls, the bonecos gigantes: more than a hundred already exist, and new figurines are created every year. These dolls are a European legacy of ^15th-century processions, when representations of the saints accompanied the processions during religious festivals. In Olinda, there are pagan reinterpretations of these figures, such as the Homem da Meia-Noite - the Midnight Man - who is the first to take to the streets, announcing the start of the festivities. Carnival is also a time for social and political criticism, when the puppets of public figures in the news of the moment are staged according to the extravagance of those who make them move.