TEN members of Wellington Carnival and Wellington Majorettes travelled to our twin town of Torres Vedras 4-7 February to take part in Torres Vedras Carnival. The trip was organised to reciprocate arrangement of our Portuguese friends taking part in Wellington Carnival back in September 2015. It was also used as a fact finding mission to see if the venue and logistics would be suitable for taking the entire troupe of Wellington Majorettes to Portugal in future years. Torres Vedras Carnival actually lasts an entire week, but the group only managed to see the first few days of the carnival. To put the size of the carnival into perspective, 350,000 people pay to watch the carnival during the week, each having paid €5 to €10 to watch the event. Dave Rylatt (carnival chair) commented, “I was taken aback by the size of the event. Wellington Majorettes should be extremely proud of themselves, they represented our town professionally in a foreign country, and took part in the Children’s Carnival on the Friday which had over 8,000 children taking part from Torres Vedras and the surrounding area. On the Friday evening, the girls played their instruments in a parade from the train station into the carnival headquarters for the formal crowning of the King and Queen of Torres Vedras. This King and Queen are nominated by the people of the town and take over the town from the Mayor for the week, they are both men, this is tradition as back in the early days, ladies were not allowed to go out and therefore the Queen had to be a man! This seems to be normal for most of the men who go to Carnival (no matter how big or hairy) to dress up in women’s clothing, although the full explanation was lost in translation.”

How many tens of thousands of people lined the route and saw the girls is not known, but the girls played tunes with their instruments kindly loaned by one of the local schools - Vitor Melicias School. We joined our “adopted” School on a number of times, we even had a tour of their School.” Louise Brierley commented, “I was astounded at the hospitality from our Portuguese hosts; from the minute we arrived we were escorted to numerous attractions before being wined and dined each day in a local restaurant. We felt very proud to be representing our town, it was amazing the amount of people who wanted to have their photos taken with our small team and with our union jack banner – they made us feel very welcome.”

The Mayor of Torres Vedras actually made a point of finding us in order to introduce himself to us during the Children’s Carnival, before inviting us to a formal civic dinner which he hosted. At the civic dinner we were introduced to many of the City Dignitary’s, Derek Hodgson (Wellington Twinning Town), and guests from Torres Vedras twin town in France.” During the Civic Dinner, the Mayor made a formal announcement that at least four members from Torres Vedras will be despatched to Wellington to take part in our carnival on 24 September 2016 and they will dress in traditional Portuguese carnival costumes. Dave Rylatt commented, “We very much look forward to reciprocating the hospitality to our Portuguese guests.”