Madonna closes her Celebration tour in Rio de Janeiro, May 4, 2024.
Madonna has brought her tour to a close with a free concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, in front of a reported 1.6million fans.
It was the final night of her retrospective tour, marking her four decades in pop, which she has been taking around the world since last October.
AP News reported that she began the show telling the crowd: “Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world. This place is magic.”
Madonna began her show with her 1998 song Nothing Really Matters, and performed many of her hits including Like a Virgin, Hung Up and Like a Prayer. She was also joined on stage by Brazilian artists Anitta and Pabilo Vittar.
Rio’s tourism agency said that 1.6million people attended the concert on the famous city beach, where huge events have taken place in the past.
The Rolling Stones performed there to 1.2 million fans in 2006, and Rod Stewart gave the biggest free rock concert in history there in 1994, drawing 4million people (although more than a few may have been there for the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks extravaganza). Madonna’s previous largest live concert crowd was 130,000 fans in Paris in 1987.