A white woman who was accidentally swapped at birth in hospital with a black baby born on the same day has told of her shock at discovering the truth about her mum.

Giovana Leite de Araujo, now 27, ended up with the wrong family when nurses took two babies born on the same day in 1997 for a bath.

Astonishingly, when they returned, they handed the babies to the wrong mothers, and despite the skin colour, the mistake was not revealed for six years.

Giovana says she believes her mum suspected something was wrong as soon as she held the other woman’s baby, but was too intimidated to speak up.

She explained: “I don’t know if it was because of the baby’s appearance, or if she had already recorded my face in her mind, or if it was just intuition.

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“She went around the room to see if she could notice anything different, but she didn’t say anything. If she had said anything, it would have been her word against the hospital’s word.”

The error was not revealed until six years later when an official from Child Protective Services came to her home in Cascavel, in the Brazilian state of Parana, and admitted the bungle.

As the two families began to meet, said Giovana, she began to learn that the other baby Angela and her substitute mum had suffered years of racist abuse.

Because Angela was darker than any of her family, said Giovana, her mum was often falsely accused of having been unfaithful to her father.

The truth only emerged when the mum who raised Angela took a DNA test that proved she was not her biological mum and sued the hospital, according to local media reports.

Giovana then took a DNA test, which confirmed the switch.

The families were eventually awarded BRL 100,000 (GBP 15,363) in compensation in 2006.

Giovana said: “At the time, a meeting was held for the families to get to know each other, but it was very difficult to deal with.

“For me and Angela, I think it was a little calmer for us. We thought it was cool to have two families. We became more aware of what had happened during our adolescence.”

But both girls remained with their foster families and met frequently to celebrate their joint birthdays together.

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When they were 12, a court hearing was held so they could choose whether to stay with their foster families or switch again to be with their biological parents.

Both girls chose to stay with their foster parents.

Giovana, who now has 23 siblings, said: “We just created bonds and became one big family.”

Her foster mother has 11 children while her father had five children from a previous relationship.

And her biological mother had six children, while her dad had two other children outside of the marriage.

Giovana explained that heartbreakingly her foster dad died six months after meeting his biological daughter.

She said: “He had more than one stroke, but thank God he managed to meet his biological daughter before he passed away.”

Giovana said that when she was at school, cruel classmates taunted her about her and sneered that she had been “found in the rubbish”.

She said: “Today I see that they were just children, they say silly things where they don’t even know what they are saying. We all go through this phase.”

Giovana, now living in Curitiba, says that she visits both her mothers and all her siblings whenever she goes to Cascavel.