Copacabana Palace

The Copacabana Palace faces the beach on Avenida Atlântica, in Rio de Janeiro, across the road and the black-and-white wave of the mosaic promenade. It opened in August 1923, and a few months later it gave its own Carnival ball, on the Saturday night. It still does. Most of Carnival happens in the street. One night of it happens in these salons, and it comes with an invitation worth reading line by line.

Date

Carnival Saturday, at ten

The next ball is on Saturday, February 6, 2027, at 10 p.m. The Saturday is the hinge of Carnival weekend. The next three nights belong to the Sambadrome, where the Special Group of samba schools parades on February 7, 8 and 9. Saturday is the night before all that, and the hotel has kept it since its first year. The hotel promises a dance floor and some of Brazil’s biggest names in music, and it counts Brigitte Bardot and Orson Welles among the ball’s guests over the decades.

The date moves with Easter, so it changes every year, from early February to early March. In 2028, Carnival Saturday falls on February 26; in 2030, on March 2.

As of November 12, 2026, the hotel had not announced the ticket price or how tickets will be sold. What you can do now is book the room, which is the harder half. Plan to land on Friday: the drive from Rio’s international airport takes about 45 minutes, and from Santos Dumont, the city airport, about 15. Book dinner that night at MEE, the hotel’s pan-Asian restaurant, which has held a Michelin star five years running.

Place

The salons, and a pool six floors up

The ball runs from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., and the hotel’s Brazilian page sells it three ways: a single ticket, a table in the Golden Room, or a table in the Noble Room. The Golden Room, one of its two largest, holds 500 people under a dome and a crystal chandelier, with tall glass doors behind bronze curtains. In 1933 Hollywood rebuilt the Copa’s salons on a film set for “Flying Down to Rio,” the first film to pair Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Hollywood copied these salons in 1933. Once a year, Rio dances in the real ones.

Now the room to sleep in. Ask for the sixth floor of the main building: every room and penthouse on that floor has the use of the Black Pool, a pool on that floor kept for them alone, behind white lattice, with the green hills above it. The Copacabana Suite, with its oversized balconies over the beach, is one of them.

The other choice is new. The Pool Wing, built in 1948 above the main pool, reopens this November after nineteen months of work, as an all-suite building: every suite has a private balcony, and most look over the pool and the beach. At the top, on the eleventh floor, the Carioca Suite is a two-bedroom penthouse facing Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain. The designer, Ivan Rezende, used timber reclaimed from the bed of the Amazon, and drew the rugs from satellite images of Acre and the Juruá River. Suites in the wing start at £905 a night, plus taxes, the hotel’s group announced. The hotel now counts 208 rooms and suites in all.

The salons have another neighbor, the Teatro Fernanda Montenegro, 332 seats. It was the hotel’s casino, where Ella Fitzgerald and Edith Piaf sang, until gambling was outlawed in 1946; more than 600 craftspeople restored it, and it reopened in 2022.

Dress

Black tie, or feathers

The hotel’s line is short: black tie and formal evening wear. Its invitation says the rest: feathers and sequins, and a night lived “in costume.” Pick one. A dinner jacket is never wrong here, and a costume is welcome if it was made for the night.

The afternoon is for getting ready. Since November 3, 2026, the Pool Wing holds the first Dior Spa in Latin America, with six treatment rooms, and a Beauty Lounge set aside for guests dressing for a celebration, with Dior products or their own makeup artist. The spa also takes guests who are not staying.

Before

Feijoada at one

On Saturdays the Pérgula serves feijoada from one to four, BRL 395 a person plus 10%, with a samba school performing live. It is the right lunch for a long night: eat it, then sleep until eight.

In between, the main pool, half the length of an Olympic one, is for guests only; it has just been resurfaced, with curves drawn across its floor. Its new bar, Bar do Copa, the first signature bar in the hotel’s history, runs along a counter of nearly 33 feet. Order a caipirinha, or a Rabo de Galo, both made with cachaça. After dark, a bossa nova set begins there.

After

Sunday to Tuesday, the Sambadrome

The parades begin the next evening. The Special Group sends four schools a night into the Sambadrome, 4.9 miles from the hotel: on Sunday, Unidos de Maricá, Beija-Flor, Paraíso do Tuiuti and Vila Isabel; on Monday, Mocidade, Unidos da Tijuca, Salgueiro and Imperatriz; on Tuesday, Portela, Viradouro, Grande Rio and Mangueira. Viradouro won in 2026. The drive takes nine minutes in free-flowing traffic, which Carnival nights do not have; ask the concierge to arrange it. Parade tickets are sold through Liesa, the league of the schools. Its rules are short: no glass, no coolers, two plastic bottles of about 17 ounces at most and two snacks a person, and anyone under sixteen with an adult.

Before the first parade, there is Sunday brunch at the Pérgula, from one to four, BRL 525 a person plus 10%. Book it with the room.

R.S.V.P.

Book the room first

Write to the concierge, [email protected], for the room and the ball in the same message, and ask for the sixth floor by name. Check-in is from 3 p.m.; on a Carnival Saturday, arrive the day before. In 2026, The World’s 50 Best Hotels ranked the Copa No. 29: you will not be the only one writing.

The rest of the year, the Copa is a feijoada on Saturdays, a party in white on New Year’s Eve, and the Atlantic across the road. On Carnival Saturday, it is the party.