When a careto swings his long, fringed hat-tail at you, watch out! If you’re a woman, he wants to “rattle” you, then skip off to find his next victim, with jangling cowbells announcing his passage through the Carnival crowds in Podence.
In northeastern Portugal, caretos grabbed the spotlight at Carnival (called Entrudo here) celebrations. The devilish creatures skipped and jumped and danced along the streets, sometimes setting off spews of fireworks. When they selected a woman, they’d swing their hat-tails, get up in her face, and dance a quick twist, side by side, to signify fertility and the coming spring.
We joined the 2026 celebrations in the city of Bragança, the town of Macedo de Cavaleiros and the village of Podence, where Entrudo is different than Carnival celebrations in our adopted hometown of Alcobaça in central Portugal.
Entrudo looks different, sounds different, tastes different, smells different, feels different. Even UNESCO acknowledged these differences in 2019, classifying the multi-day pre-Lenten observances as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Saturday: parades and museum
Bragança adopted the caretos of Podence, famous for causing masked mayhem.
We opted to stay in Bragança – the largest city in Portugal’s northeast, an area called Trás-os-Montes (Behind the Mountains) – because it had more accommodation options for the four prime days of Entrudo festivities. Bragança is a 30-minute drive to Podence, the most famous village for careto craziness.
The woman in Bragança’s tourist office explained that surrounding towns and villages celebrate a variety of winter festivals, starting with the winter solstice, going through Christmas, and culminating with Carnival (Entrudo) just before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Some festivals have caretos, some don’t.
“We adopted the tradition of the [Podence] caretos here because people like them,” she said. “They chase women for fertility.”
Our next stop: the Iberian Museum of the Mask and the Costume, where we saw dozens of wonderful masks and colourful costumes from surrounding villages.
Set within Bragança’s citadel walls, the small museum also featured careto accoutrements, such as shawls, belts, bells, and long wooden staffs. About 50 mannequins sported costumes – some quite different from Podence’s stripey fringes – from around Tras-os-Montes as well as bordering Spanish towns.
The Iberian Museum of the Mask and the Costume exhibited many types of careto outfits (above) and masks (below).
Red and black devils were favourites, as well as skeletons, horned animals, and long fringes made from grass and what looked like newspapers. We examined masks made from wood, wool, tin, cork and other tree barks, leather, fur, and sheepskin. Some had goofy eyes; others were mysterious, creepy or scary. But all fascinating.
On the down side, the museum lacked good information – in Portuguese or English – about what we were seeing. Fortunately, I had learned a few terms ahead of time:
- Entrudo: another word for Carnival.
- Caretos: devil-like creatures wearing masks and cow-bell-like rattles to disturb the peace, express joy at the end of winter, and celebrate fertility as the earth reawakens in springtime. The Podence program advertised “Caretos à Solta” meaning “devils on the loose.”
- Chocalheiro: a person who rattles bells. Podence calls its celebrations “Entrudo Chocalheiro” meaning “Rattling Carnival.”
- Pregão casamenteiro: matchmaker auctions
- Casamentos: weddings
- Queima do Entrudo: Burning of Carnival, i.e. burning an effigy to mark the end of winter and the start of spring
Macedo de Cavaleiros’ excellent parade featured caretos (centre) swinging the long woollen tails that hung from their hoods, plus hundreds of other parade people and floats. And booze!
Unfortunately, Bragança’s Saturday parade and effigy burning had been cancelled in anticipation of more of the bad weather plaguing Portugal. (And indeed, Carnival in Alcobaça was severely curtailed after the Jan. 28 Kristin hurricane and subsequent named storms lashed central Portugal in 2026.) So, we drove to the town of Macedo de Cavaleiros for its Night Parade. The overcast evening was rain-free after all.
Skipping caretos led the parade, their rattles jangling as they bounced towards us holding a long stick spewing fireworks that looked like a sparkler on steroids. I clapped my hands in child-like joy when I spotted them for the first time, clad in their yellow, green, and red-fringed hooded jackets and pants. Just like I’d seen in photos. I found it thrilling when research popped to life!
People cheered and laughed as the caretos rattled women along the parade route. One careto grabbed a pretty young woman standing next to us and danced her down the street, much to the delight of her friends, who videoed the rattling.
Skipping caretos led the parade, rattling women along the route.
The careto tradition goes back more than two thousand years, to the pagan indigenous peoples of the Iberian Peninsula – before Portugal was a country. Dressing as masked devils invokes bad spirits in order to reconcile with them. Rattling women symbolizes fertility, not just of people but also of the earth. Caretos help drive winter away and welcome spring. The ancient traditions have survived because, as the centuries rolled on, they morphed and adapted as Celts, Romans, and Christians invaded and stayed.
The parade included a long line of floats, marching bands, stilt walkers, fire-eaters, jugglers, and people dressed as jellyfish, hobby-horse-riders, princesses, and ambulance drivers. Kids threw confetti that had been gathered from local paper shredders.
Several floats featured casks of wine or other spirits, with free samples! One guy upended a wineskin over my mouth, for a drink of horrendous red wine. The space-themed float people gave us paper cups of a very strong brandy that made us blink our eyes and pucker our lips. I’ve never received booze from a Canadian parade before!
Caretos held up the rear as well, carrying another fountain of fireworks as they wove and jingled along the street.
Sunday: food and masks
A sausage vendor held a butelo – the roundish pig’s-bladder stuffed sausage used to cook the butelo stew. It’s served with cooked casulas (dried beans).
In the enormous Bragança festival tents the next day, we roamed the aisles of food and craft vendors, chatting with some about dried beans, butelo, and masks.
We had learned the basics about butelo and casulas from the woman in the Bragança tourist office. A Bragança tradition, butelo is a stew made from every part of the pig, including the bones.
“It tastes better than it looks,” she assured us. “It’s very good.” The stew is eaten with potatoes, onions, and casulas – dried beans that have been cooked; they’re eaten pod and all.
“We’ll definitely have to try that,” I said.
I chatted with a man selling butelos and learned more. As well as the name of the stew, butelo is the name of a large ball of sausage shaped like the pig’s bladder it was made from. The bladder is stuffed with all the leftover pig parts, including bones, after other sausages are made. Then it’s smoked. Strings of butelos festooned many vendor booths. Cost: 30 to 35 euros per kilo.
The butelo man explained that, to make the butelo dish, you stew the butelo sausage along with two other kinds of sausage for about three hours. He pointed out the other types of sausage that he uses.
He handed me a recipe card for “Butelo com Casulas,” which clarified an important point: ear flaps and feet are optional ingredients. Ah, I was wondering. The casula beans are soaked overnight, then gently boiled for about an hour. The onions and potatoes are cooked separately. When all is cooked, you cut open the butelo, pile everything on a plate and drizzle generously with local olive oil. I’m just not sure where I’ll find a butelo outside of Tras-os-Montes.
Isidro Rodrigues kindly donned one of his metal masks so I could take a photo of him. Other masks were displayed around the tents.
We moved on to chat with a couple of mask makers, all in Portuguese (we’re getting better!). Isidro Rodrigues hand-makes metal masks from tin or zinc in primitive styles with pointy noses, horns and sharp teeth. His masks start at 45 euros each.
“They personify grotesque figures such as oxen, goats, satyrs and demons,” said Rodrigues’ pamphlet (translated). “Even today, beyond their decorative or aesthetic function, these are important ritual objects.”
Victor Alfonso has been carving wooden masks since 1998, primarily for his village of Ousilhão´s festival over Christmas, which connects Christian and pagan rituals, according to his translated pamphlet. He uses chestnut – the predominant wood in the area – as well as alder and walnut.
Our takeaway butelo meal was delicious!
We spotted a big restaurant area in one of Bragança´s big tents. Earlier, we had eaten a huge lunch that featured wild boar and chestnuts. Bill and our friend Arthur had boar burgers, while our friend Kathleen and I had warm salads of boar, chestnuts and kale. We all shared chestnut pie (no crust; more like a firm flan) for dessert.
I asked the host in the tent restaurant if we could get a butelo meal “para levar” (to go), and he was happy to comply. He warned that we’d need just two dinners for four people, but we were still so stuffed from lunch that we opted for one dinner (22 euros).
We tried it later at our apartment. It was really delicious! The butelo and other sausages had a very smokey, rich flavour. The casula beans were quite tender, even the casings. I would have it again. I suspect that butelo meals vary, depending on whose mother or grandmother made it.
Monday: murals, music, museum, marafonas, marriage
Some of the murals in Podence included the Pope, football star Ronaldo, and local celebrities whose names eluded us. A new mural is added each year.
Finally, we got to Podence!
Said to house about 200 people, depending on your source, the village felt bigger, but perhaps that was due to the crowds. We wandered up and down the main road, admiring the murals painted on walls, utility boxes, houses, and the sides of dilapidated buildings.
I bought a careto-striped hat – partly to blend in with the revelry but also because it was cold! (It’s possible I’m losing my Canadian edge for tolerating cold weather.)
Yummy smells of barbecued meat, wood smoke, and cinnamon drifted from taverns, bars, and streetside stands. Two men attended steamy cauldrons over a fire beside the main road; they were cooking soup and feijoada (the local style of bean and sausage stew). Drink stands sold glasses of ginjinha (sour cherry liqueur) but I bought a cup of warm mulled wine and sipped as we wandered. Our friends bought crepes – which seemed fitting in advance of Pancake Tuesday the next day.
Several roving quartets, quintets, and marching bands provided a musical backdrop that made it feel we were inside a promotional video. Our toes tapped to the pounding drums, saxophone, clarinet, guitars, bagpipes (from Portugal’s Celtic ancestors, I assumed) and horns made from real animal horns. Their music, combined with the careto cowbells, created a cacophony.
Lace-faced marafonas also played in roving bands, on horns (literally) and bagpipes.
Jangly bells announced roving groups of caretos passing by. Some caretos were quite small – adorable young boys in mini-costumes, often holding a parent’s hand. Occasionally, caretos would slide their masks up to chat with friends, revealing that many were young and teenage girls. The tradition of men as caretos is adapting to cultural change once again. Women and children are now included.
We passed people dressed in skirts (some women, many men) and wearing lace doilies over their faces. They were marafonas, said to be the only beings that the caretos respect.
The small, yet excellent, Museum of Caretos of Podence explained the traditions and careto antics, and exhibited more costumes, rattles, masks, and paintings. Podence’s Entrudo almost disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s when the Salazar dictatorship (from the 1920s to 1974), colonial wars in Africa, and economic changes led to a mass exodus of young men.
But in 1976, two years after the dictatorship ended, a film called “Mascaras” (Masks) was released. Shot in several Tras-os-Montes villages, the film showed just three caretos in Podence, but it helped gain attention for Entrudo. Revival began in the 1980s, when the village created an association to improve its festivals. The caretos began a comeback. They even travelled to other European countries for cultural festivals. As they gained popularity, people began to visit Podence for Entrudo. The traditions received a further boost and protection with UNESCO’s designation in 2019.
Podence’s mock marriage ceremony took place on the steps of the village church, all eerily lit up in red with many black shadows. The round windows looked like eyes, with the pediment-nose between them.
As night fell, we gathered with others in front of the eerily red-lit church for the matchmaker auction and mock weddings. Other spectators perched on walls, balconies and roofs overlooking the church steps. We weren’t sure what to expect. While we waited, caretos danced around, entertaining people like jesters in medieval castles.
A procession slowly made its way through the throng towards the church: people carrying long wax torches, a canopy bobbing over VIPs, musicians, marafonas, a person with a huge white goat mask, and another dressed as a hairy wolf. The smell of burning wax drifted over the attentive crowd. The processionists ascended the church steps and the ceremony began.
Various men (no women) spoke using big funnels as megaphones (with a real microphone in front of it). All in Portuguese of course, so we didn’t understand much. I could pick out the words for wedding (casamento) and husband (marido). They seemed to be following the script I’d read in the museum: announcing fictional couples and making satirical comments about them and what they deserved for dowries. The museum said older dowries, such as a sewing machine for a good seamstress, have been modernized to cell phones, cars, and PlayStations.
People laughed. They booed in jest. They jeered and laughed some more.
We shrugged.
If you spoke Portuguese, and knew the inside jokes about the mock pairings, it was likely hilarious and strengthened community bonds.
Fire seemed to be the theme for Monday night – a preliminary effigy (right) burned red, and then fireworks lit the sky.
After the mock weddings, we began threading our way through the crowd towards our car. But, passing by a big open field called the Eira do Careto, we stopped to watch two men and a woman perform with flames. They swallowed fire, twirled fire around themselves on long batons, and performed acrobatics with fiery hula hoops, to much applause.
We tried to leave again, but a preliminary effigy – not the big effigy for the next day, but a smaller one – became engulfed in fire. A huge red metal mask atop a chicken wire frame remained when the flames finally petered out.
Certainly, the festivities had ended then? No! Fireworks burst into balls of red, green and yellow pinpoints above us. I love a good fireworks display and this one was excellent – a constant stream of booms and staccato bursts.
Finally, people trod uphill to the bars and restaurants to party on, but we made it to our car on our third attempt.
Shrove Tuesday: effigy burning and goodbye to winter
The Queima do Entrudo – Burning of Carnival – involves burning a 30-foot-high effigy of a careto to mark the end of winter.
We returned to Podence on Shrove Tuesday for the symbolic effigy burning, the climax of Entrudo Chocalheiro. Thousands of other people had the same idea. It was three times as crowded as the day before. We parked two kilometres away and hiked to the village.
Crowds lined the main street for the procession of marafonas, caretos, and bands – all headed to the field where a 30-foot-high effigy of a careto stood with arms raised.
Bill hates crowds much more than I do. He and Kathleen opted to stand near the museum, where their view of the effigy was somewhat blocked by leafless trees. Arthur and I wanted better views, so we wove through the sea of people to find spots along the edge of the field.
The effigy was made of fir tree branches, painted in the careto stripes of yellow, green and red. It held a wooden staff in its right hand. I couldn’t tell what the mask and bells were made of. Guy wires held it upright.
As the procession reached the field, caretos jangled and skipped around the effigy, which suddenly burst into flame. The crowd cheered. We were all part of a two-thousand-year tradition.
Flames licked up the effigy, igniting fireworks stuffed inside. Spews of sparklers arose from its head. The wooden staff collapsed. I wondered how those woolly fringes of the dancing caretos didn’t catch on fire as well.
Burning an effigy is the climax of Podence celebrations.
I was squished up against a young couple and their daughter and we got chatting. From Porto, the wife had attended in 2025 and said the crowd was far smaller.
“If I’d known it would be this crowded, I wouldn’t have come,” she said.
I felt a pang of guilt. Was I, as a visitor and a travel blog writer, contributing to over-tourism? Could this small village handle increasing influxes of visitors? On the other hand, visitors contributed to the local economy and allowed these traditions to continue with stronger community support. Arguments could be made both ways. We certainly felt welcomed by everyone we talked to.
“Venha, primavera!” shouted the husband as flames licked higher and more fireworks exploded.
“Ah, I understood that!” I exclaimed, thrilled that my Portuguese was improving. “You said, ‘Come, spring!’”
“Venha, primavera!” I whispered. Adeus winter.
Ash Wednesday
I got rattled by this leather-masked careto! He then happily posed for a selfie.
We left early on Ash Wednesday, so we missed Bragança’s event involving the three characters of Diabo, Morte e Censura: the Devil, Death and Censorship.
“They are the three worst things in life,” explained our tourist information woman. (Very interesting that Portugal includes censorship with death and the devil; it makes sense after the country suffered heavy censorship under the Salazar dictatorship.)
Death is inevitable for all. I decry censorship, especially as a retired journalist. But as for the devil… well, he was lots of fun!
I got rattled… twice, in fact! By an older careto (he lifted his leather mask, so I could see he was about my age), and by a young boy or girl careto who could have been a grandchild. I was honoured.
We celebrated Entrudo in Bragança, Macedo de Cavaleiros, and Podence in February 2026. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.
What a fantastic – and colourful – addition to your growing series of blog posts! We are soooo dull here in Canada when it comes to Carnival. But an outdoor Carnival here would only attract the hardiest of souls, all muffled in their heavy winter coats, wearing scarves, toques, mitts, and clunky winter boots. The costumes in your photos are so amazing, but not skimpy and revealing, like in Brazil. So sad. 🙁 (Hey! I’m a guy, eh? I may be old, but I’m not dead! 😉 But those devils looked petty scary to me. Those murals in Podence are so beautiful. I’ll take your word the butelo tasted great because it looks so unappetizing to me. (Bones in the mix?? Ugh!) It still looks pretty chilly there, but it’s got to be warmer than here at the moment. Thanks for another great installment. Stay safe and warm – and send a little Spring our way, please!
BTW: I love your colourful new “toque.”
Lol! Ottawa has a winter festival — Winterlude! Not quite as colourful, but skating on the canal and the ice sculptures were always my favourites. I will wear my new stripey careto toque the next time I’m in Ottawa for Winterlude. Podence was much colder than Alcobaça, where we live. Other Carnival celebrations in southern Portugal have more of the skimpy costumes, so maybe you’d like that!
You are having a colourful time!
Yes, very colourful! Especially yellow, green and red!
That was certainly an interesting article. I didn’t realize that they had these festivals there, but, certainly is a great way to chase the winter away. We would have one in Canada but we would all freeze to death. Lol. I can’t take the cold anymore either (must be THE age thing).
Lol, yes, a good chance of freezing to death in Edmonton! I’m all for chasing winter away too.
What an amazing festival! And what a privilege to get your interpretation of it, Kathryn.
Thanks, Moe! I can always count on you for quickly reading my stories! Entrudo was indeed a fantastic festival. So different from anything else we’ve seen in Portugal.