RIO DE JANEIRO: Casting aside its economic woes, corruption scandals and recent humiliation on the football pitch, Brazil opened five days of non-stop partying on Friday as Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival officially opened.

“King Momo,” the portly partier who presides over Carnival, gave the official green light for the lavish festivities to begin, after arriving in a limousine flanked by the carnival queen and two princesses.

“For the second straight year I receive the key to the city and declare Rio carnival open,” said this year’s “Momo,” 28-year-old Wilson Dias da Costa Neto, before busting some samba moves as revellers showered him with confetti.

Mayor Eduardo Paes joked that he was happy to relinquish symbolic control of the sprawling city and its “traffic snarl-ups” to Momo for a few days, noting: “I’ll be back at work from Ash on Wednesday”.

A dozen samba schools, each with thousands of performers, compete on Sunday and Monday in the Special Parade, which will draw around 70,000 spectators to the city’s fabled Sambadrome.

A bevy of celebrities attend each year. Tennis star Rafael Nadal is expected in Rio before long.

But for three weeks, Rio and other major Brazilian cities have been awash with hundreds of colourful street parades, known as blocos, each seeking to out-do one another in volume and visual outrageousness, with garish garb and cross-dressing de rigueur.

The countless street groups, whose traditions date back to the early 18th century, will be led by the Cordao da Bola Preta, Rio’s oldest group, founded in 1918, which will gather an estimated 1.8 million people.

Around a million tourists — most of them Brazilian — will descend on Rio, cramming the city for the dizzying and decibel-defying spectacle.

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play