Madonna gave a free concert on the most famous beach in Brazil. 1.6 million people came to see it

Madonna held a free concert on Copacabana beach on Saturday evening, turning the stretch of sand in Rio de Janeiro into a huge dance floor, full of fans, reports News.ro.

It was the last show of The Celebration tour, which started in October in London.

The “Queen of Pop” kicked off the show with her 1998 hit “Nothing Really Matters.” Huge applause went up from the crowd. Others held house parties in brightly lit apartments and hotels overlooking the sea. Helicopters and drones flew overhead, and motorboats and sailboats moored offshore dotted the bay.

“Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna, 65, told the crowd. Showing the view of the ocean, the mountains and the Christ the Redeemer statue that dominates the city, she added: “This place is magical.”

Madonna performed her famous songs, including “Like A Virgin” and “Hung Up”. For the introduction of “Like A Prayer”, her head was completely covered by a black cape, with a rosary in her hand.

The star paid emotional tribute to “all the bright lights” lost to AIDS as she sang ‘Live to Tell’, with black and white photographs of people who have died from the disease appearing behind her.

Later, he was joined on stage by Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.

An estimated 1.6 million people attended the show, G1 reported, citing the Rio city hall’s tourism agency. This figure is more than 10 times higher than Madonna’s record attendance of 130,000 at Parc des Sceaux in Paris in 1987. Madonna’s official website billed the show as the biggest of her four-year career decades.

The city hall produced a report in April, estimating that this concert will bring 293 million reais ($57 million) to the local economy. According to the hotel association in Rio, the capacity of the hotels was to reach 98% in Copacabana. Fans from all over Brazil and even Argentina and France searched for Airbnbs for the weekend, the platform said in a statement. The international airport of Rio de Janeiro had foreseen an increase of 170 flights between May 1-6, from 27 destinations, the city hall stated in a statement.

Rio’s state security plan included the presence of 3,200 military and 1,500 civilian police on standby. In the period leading up to the concert, the Brazilian navy inspected the ships that wanted to position themselves at sea to watch the show.

A number of huge concerts have also been held on Copacabana Beach, including a 1994 New Year’s Eve show by Rod Stewart that drew more than 4 million fans and was the largest free rock concert in history, according to Guinness World Records. Many of those spectators also came to see the fireworks display in Rio, however, so a more apt comparison might be to the Rolling Stones concert in 2006, which drew 1.2 million people on sand, according to the military police in Rio, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported at the time.

Publisher: MB

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