Sun For Sale

If you Google “What to do in Rio when it rains” you will get a lot of hits. That’s because most of the nicest ‘Rio activities’ involve being outside – lazing on the beach, a churrasco at a friend’s place, a walk to the waterfall, wandering and sight seeing. And of course rain = clouds = you won’t see much from the lookouts at Pão de Açucar or the Cristo. 


When it starts raining, many people seem to go into suspended animation, cancelling everything until the rain stops and normal service can be resumed. 

Call everyone to cancel the churrasco, ensure you have plenty of snacks in the house and then prepare for an 80s movie marathon…

But it doesn’t have to be this way! If your event simply can’t be rescheduled and you have enough cash, then there is a solution. The answer lies with an indigenous spirit named Cacique Cobra Coral.

Apparently this spirit previously contacted Galileo Galilei and Abraham Lincoln and is now able to communicate with this lady, Adelaide Scritori:

Galileo, Lincoln, erm… Adelaide. I have to say, I was surprised when I first saw her photo. No crazy headdress or mysterious clothes/tattoos/jewellery – she looks like any other 50 something Brazilian woman (on her way to a party)

She is the head of the FCCC (Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral), a foundation whose stated aim is to “minimise disasters that occur due to imbalances between man and nature”. This translates to claiming to be able stop or start the rain and generally control the weather. Of course, all this work requires money…

OK, so far so what? There are plenty of people out in the world making outlandish claims and conning gullible people out of money. The shocking part is that these guys are regularly paid large sums of public money to prevent rain at major events around Brazil, including Rio’s carnival and New Year’s celebrations. 

They were tasked to prevent rain at Rock In Rio this year and when it did indeed rain, their response was (I’ll paraphrase): We couldn’t get access to the site because we didn’t have an entrance sticker on the car, so we concentrated on preventing flooding in the city by distributing the rain evenly.

On Adelaide’s Wikipedia entry there are three accomplishments claimed: 1) Raising the temperature in London to 29°C (as if!); 2) Abruptly stopping rain in Santa Catarina; 3) Moving a storm out to see in Rio de Janeiro. Never before have the accompanying “Citation needed” links seemed more fitting.

And yet I have been amazed by how many Brazilians respond “I know, it’s crazy. But it really does work!”. Everyone, including the press, seems determined to believe! Perhaps this is why politicians can get away with paying them? In rather a cunning move, the FCCC also has an insurance business. 

As you might imagine, the Church isn’t particularly fond of all this. I wonder how the Pope would have felt if he’d known that, in preparation for this 2007 visit to São Paulo, the FCCC were asked to raise the temperature and ‘clean the sky’.

You did what?