Classroom lesson · Festival · 🇵🇾 Paraguay

Encarnación Carnival

South America's most colourful street party in the south

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Every January and February, the city of Encarnación in southern Paraguay holds one of the most spectacular carnivals in all of South America. Thousands of dancers dressed in dazzling feathered costumes parade through streets lit up with floodlights, and the music, dancing, and colour go on through every Friday and Saturday night for weeks.

Tell me more

Encarnación Carnival is so big and so vibrant that many Paraguayans and visitors from all over the world call it the best carnival on the continent after Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Competing groups called comparsas spend months before carnival sewing their costumes by hand — enormous feathered headdresses, sparkling bodices, and sequinned capes that can weigh up to 20 kilograms.

The parade route, known as the sambodromo, is lined with spectators who cheer, dance, and wave as the comparsas go past. Each group has its own theme, music, and choreography — judges score them on everything from the coordination of the dancers to the quality of the costumes and the originality of their story. Winning the carnival is a huge honour for the whole group.

Behind the scenes, carnival is a community effort. Grandmothers and children sew alongside professional costume designers; drummers practise for months to get their rhythms perfectly synchronised; float builders construct enormous moving sculptures from papier-mâché, wire, and paint. Almost everyone in the city is involved in some way.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

01The comparsas spend months making their costumes before the carnival even starts — what does that tell you about how important the event is to them?
02Carnival is a community event where everyone from grandmothers to children gets involved. Why might making something together as a community be more enjoyable than making it alone?
03If your school held a carnival parade, what theme would you choose for your group, and what would your costume look like?

Try this

Classroom activity

Design a carnival costume. Choose a theme (an animal, a natural landscape, a Paraguayan tradition). Draw the costume from the front and the back, label the colours and materials you would use, and write three sentences explaining what your theme represents.

Encarnación Carnival

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Discussion prompts

Classroom activity

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