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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: During her first show in Rio de Janeiro, Taylor Swift took a break to ensure that fans were provided with water. As temperatures neared 100 degrees on Friday, prompting an excessive heat warning, Swift halted the performance and threw a water bottle into the crowd.
Addressing the situation during the Evermore set, she pointed to a floor section and said, “There are people that need water right here, maybe 30, 35, 40 feet back. So whoever is in charge of giving them that, just make sure that happens. Can I get a signal that you know where they are?”
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While the crowd chanted, “Water, water, water, water,” Swift, off-stage, spoke to her team, asking, “Do you see the phones?”
Late spring in Rio, coupled with humidity, was expected to make Saturday feel like 109 degrees.
In the “Red” era, before the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” Taylor seized a water bottle from one side of the diamond stage and effortlessly tossed it to fans on the other side while singing: “And you held my lifeless frame, and I know it’s long gone, and there was nothing else I could do.
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” Taylor Swift expressed gratitude to Brazilians before playing “Champagne Problems,” acknowledging a fan campaign that projected a “Junior Jewels” inspired T-shirt onto the Christ the Redeemer statue.
Taylor Swift, who started the show by welcoming the sold-out crowd in Portuguese, has two more shows in Rio de Janeiro before heading to São Paulo for the final stop of the 2023 tour leg.
After lobbying from “Swifties,” Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue lit up to welcome Taylor Swift to Brazil ahead of a concert on Friday as part of her global blockbuster “Eras Tour.”
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Fans gathered at the statue, and it went dark before being reilluminated with a light-projection tribute to Swift’s “Junior Jewels” T-shirt, reading “Welcome to Brasil” in English but using the Portuguese spelling of “Brazil.”
The tribute followed a social media campaign by fans, and the Catholic rector responsible for the statue, Omar Raposo, challenged them to raise 300,000 reais ($60,000) for charity. Despite technical problems with the fundraising site, over 180,000 reais were raised in less than 24 hours.
The funds will be used for food baskets to mark the World Day of the Poor on November 19.
In addition to the statue tribute, a giant ferris wheel on Rio’s Guanabara Bay was lit up with the message “Love’s a Game, Wanna Play?”—a lyric from Swift’s hit song “Blank Space.”
In a separate event, Taylor Swift’s iconic white T-shirt from the 2008 music video “You Belong with Me” was projected onto the Christ the Redeemer statue to mark the beginning of her Eras concert tour in Brazil.
Fans, known as Swifties, had requested the acknowledgment, and Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes confirmed the projection, comparing Taylor’s popularity to that of Michael Jackson. Rector Omar Raposo turned the projection into a fundraising opportunity, asking fans to donate water and panettone for local charities on the World Day of the Poor.
The singer’s Brazil tour includes six concerts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
