Liverpool Samba School Blog

Mangueira Samba School will be playing with us at this year’s carnival for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year! This amazing news adds to the buzz already surounding what promises to be the biggest carnival Liverpool has ever seen, coming up on 2nd of August.

Over 80 years old, Mangueira is one of the most celebrated samba schools in the ‘grupo especial’ of Rio de Janeiro’s competitive yearly ‘carnaval’ (in effect, the equivalent of the F.A cup for samba) -a huge event held in the Sambodromo, a purpose built arena, in Rio each year. Thier iconic pink and green colour scheme makes Mangueira stand out amongst the other schools as they have paraded away as champions with the ’super campea’ title on numerous occasions.

Pink and green or ‘verde e rosa’ colours Manguiera’s costumes, the instruments and even the buildings in their vast favela-based community centre. The centre includes schemes for education, training, sports and community leisure, which benefits hugely from revenue from carnaval competition wins, and year-round preparation is taken extremely seriously, with band practices beginning mid- august for the following February!

Mangueira is famous for their super-fast, super-accurate batucada with the emphasis on the second beat. We are very excited that members of the famous percusion ‘bateria’ will be playing batacada with us again this year in the Liverpool parade, including our own Mangueira-style variation, which we have been playing for many years now, since our connection with Manguiera was first established and we visited their Palácio do Samba with contributions to their community projects (and also a number of Liverpool Football Club shirts!) as seen in these photographs.

Come along for your chance to hear these word class percussionists playing alongside our home grown bateria on the streets of Liverpool this year!