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