São Paulo LGBTQ Pride Parade is an annual gay pride parade that has taken place in Avenida Paulista, in the city ofSão Paulo, Brazil, since 1997. It is South America’s largest Pride parade, and is listed by Guinness World Records as the biggest pride parade in the world starting in 2006 with 2.5 million people. They broke the Guinness record in 2009 with four million attendees. They have kept the title from 2006 to at least 2016. They had five million attendants in 2017. As of 2019 it has three to five million each year. In 2010, the city hall of São Paulo invested 1 million reais in the parade. The event is the second largest of the city, after only Formula One. According to the LGBT app Grindr, the gay parade of the city was elected the best in the world. The Pride and its associated events are organized by the APOGLBT, Associação da Parada do Orgulho de Gays, Lesbicas, Bissexuais e Travestis e Transexuais, since its foundation in 1999. The march is the event's main activity and the one that draws the biggest attention to the press, the Brazilian authorities as well as to the hundreds of thousands of curious people that line themselves along the parade's route. In 2009, 3.2 million people attended the 13th annual São Paulo Gay Pride Parade. The meeting point is at the Museum of Art of São Paulo right at the middle of São Paulo's postcard Avenida Paulista. Even though the meeting time is at 12 noon, the parade doesn't start to move before 2 or 3 PM. The parade is 2.6 miles long and starts at Avenida Paulista, at around noon. It follows Rua da Consolação to the end at Praça Roosevelt, in Downtown São Paulo, at around 10 PM. Strongly supported by the State and the City of São Paulogovernment authorities, the event counts with a solid securityplan. These are last year's numbers: approximately 2,000 policemen, two mobile police stations for immediate reporting of occurrences, 30 equipped ambulances, 55 nurses, 46 medical physicians, and three hospital camps with 80 beds. The São Paulo Gay Pride Parade is heavily supported by the federal government as well as by the Governor of São Paulo and the city mayor. Many politicians show up to open the main event and the government often parades with a float with politicians on top of it. Caixa Econômica Federal, a government bank, and Petrobrás, Brazil's oil firm, have already reaffirmed their commitment to back up the event and its diversity, funding once again the event. In the Pride the city usually receives about 400,000 tourists and moves between R$ 180 million and R$ 190 million.
Participants
The first parade in 1997 gathered around 2,000 s, according to the military police. The ninth parade gathered over 2.5 million people according to the police and 3 million according to the organizers. The military police, which traditionally counts the number of participants at major public events, does not release its estimates for attendance at the parade since then, which caused the omission of the Parade from the 2008 issue of Guinness that requires official sources for records regarding attendance at events. According to the police, it would be impossible to count the number of people attending an event with a "floating population." There has been controversy about the exact number of participants.
