More than a million music fans gathered at Brazil’s iconic Copacabana beach to prove their love to Madonna over the weekend.
The “Get into the Groove” and “Vogue” pop diva concluded her career-spanning Celebration Tour with a bang over the weekend, treating fans in Rio de Janeiro to a free beach concert on Saturday. “This really happened,” the singer reminisced in an Instagram video shared Sunday.
The Instagram clip shows an aerial view of attendees assembling on the sandy Brazilian strip, which stretches more than 2 miles along the coast. While some fans danced on the beach, others hosted house parties in nearby beachfront apartments and hotels, the Associated Press reported.
“This place is magic,” the 65-year-old singing icon said during her show, which also featured appearances from Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabllo Vittar.
An estimated 1.6 million people gathered for Madonna’s Celebration Tour finale, Brazilian outlet G1 reported, citing Rio City Hall’s tourism agency. The event was also broadcast on Brazilian network TV Globo. Even before a million-plus fans descended on Copacabana over the weekend, Madonna announced in late March that her send-off would be her “biggest gig yet.”
“The show will be free of charge as a thank you to her fans for celebrating more than four decades of her music over the course of the epic global run of the tour,” her website said.
Saturday’s concert broke Madge’s personal attendance record — 130,000 fans at Paris’ Parc des Sceaux in 1987 — by more than tenfold. Madonna also bested the record previously held by the Rolling Stones’ 2006 Copacabana concert, which drew 1.5 million people.
”@Madonna makes history in Rio tonight marking the largest ever standalone concert for any artist, with over 1.6 million fans attending as she closes The Celebration Tour,” Live Nation announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday.
Madonna’s Celebration Tour launched in October, months after she was hospitalized for a bacterial infection last June. The Grammy winner brought her headline-generating tour to Inglewood’s Kia Forum for several nights in March.
Times critic Mikael Wood wrote that the singer’s Celebration Tour “was curiously short on joy.”
“A pop concert is a theater of personality and craft, not one of plot or character development,” he added. “But a narrative this messy needed more razzle-dazzle.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
