The 10 Most Spectacular Carnivals in The World

Rio de Janeiro's Carnival is the largest and most famous in the world, headlined by Sambadrome parades where the city's top samba schools compete through the night in elaborate feathered costumes and floats years in the making.

Beyond the Sambadrome, hundreds of free street parties called blocos take over neighbourhoods for days, open to anyone who wants to dance along.

For over a thousand years, Venice has marked the weeks before Lent with elaborate porcelain masks and Baroque-era costumes, worn by visitors who pose motionless along the canals and in St Mark's Square as if stepped from a painting.

The Flight of the Angel, where a costumed performer descends by wire from the Campanile into the square, opens the festival each year.

Widely credited as the origin point for Caribbean carnival culture, Trinidad's celebration in Port of Spain centres on 'mas', costumed bands of thousands moving through the streets in elaborate beaded and feathered designs to soca and steelpan music.

J'ouvert, the pre-dawn paint-and-mud opening event, kicks off the main carnival days in deliberately chaotic contrast.

New Orleans' Mardi Gras builds for weeks through parades run by dozens of krewes, social clubs that design elaborate floats and toss beads, cups and doubloons to crowds along St Charles Avenue and through the French Quarter.

By Fat Tuesday the city is in full costume, with the Krewe of Zulu and Krewe of Rex parades considered the day's centrepiece events.

Colombia's biggest carnival and, by most measures, the second-largest in the world after Rio, Barranquilla's four-day celebration blends African, Indigenous and Spanish traditions into parades of cumbia dancers and marimonda figures with their signature long-nosed masks.

UNESCO recognised it in 2003 for how intact its folkloric traditions remain.

Europe's largest street festival takes over west London every August bank holiday, born from Notting Hill's Caribbean community in the 1960s and now drawing over a million people to watch steel bands, soca floats and dancers in feathered, sequinned costumes wind through the neighbourhood's terraced streets, sound systems blasting reggae and dancehall late into the evening.

High in the Bolivian Andes, Oruro's carnival is built around the Diablada, an elaborate devil dance performed by dancers in ornate horned masks and embroidered costumes depicting the battle between good and evil.

UNESCO recognised the event in 2001 for how deeply its folklore and costume-making traditions are woven into the city's identity.

Basel's carnival opens at exactly 4am with the Morgestraich: every streetlight in the old town switches off, and thousands of costumed marchers set out through darkness lit only by hand-painted lanterns worn on their heads.

Three days of fife-and-drum cliques and satirical floats follow, built around a different secret theme each year.

UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage in 2017; it remains a local event run by the same societies.

Recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage, Binche's carnival centres on the Gilles, several hundred local men who don wax masks, ostrich-feather hats and bell-covered costumes to dance through the small Belgian town on Shrove Tuesday, throwing blood oranges into the crowd for luck.

The tradition is fiercely protected, passed down through families.

Cologne takes carnival more seriously than almost any other German city, its 'fifth season' building to its real climax on Rose Monday, when satirical floats and marching bands parade through the city centre while crowds shout 'Kolle Alaaf' and scramble for thrown sweets.

Costumed carnival societies, some dating to the 1820s, organise much of the festivities.