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Samba City
About fourteen big samba schools keep a warehouse here
Cidade do Samba, or Samba City, is a complex of buildings in the neighborhood of Gamboa, where the schools prepare for carnival. About fourteen of the major samba schools have a warehouse in the complex. Since 2005 they have used this warehouse complex, the size of ten football pitches, to build and house the elaborate floats.
A year of work
A school spends months on its theme, its song and its floats
Each of the main schools spends many months each year designing the theme, holding a competition for its song, building the floats and rehearsing. The work is overseen by a carnavalesco, or carnival director. Throughout the year the schools also hold rehearsals for the yearly carnival parade.
A community club
A samba school is a community club, not a classroom
Samba schools do not offer instruction in a formal setting. They are clubs for dancing, marching and drumming, tied to a neighborhood, and they affirm the Afro-Brazilian heritage. The name is popularly held to come from the schoolyard where the first group rehearsed. In Rio they are mostly associated with poor neighborhoods, the favelas.
The people
The costumes give work to thousands of the poorest
Each school's parade may consist of about 3,000 performers or more. The preparations, especially producing the many different costumes, provide work for thousands of the poorest in Brazilian society. It is often said that someone in a samba school may have no job or food on the table all year, but will find the money for a costume.
The fire
A fire in 2011 threatened 8400 costumes and twenty floats
On the early morning of Monday February 7, 2011, four weeks before carnival, a fire broke out in the buildings. The warehouses hold many costumes and floats, often made of inflammable materials. Some 8400 costumes and twenty floats, belonging to three samba schools, might be lost.
In this plan
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Cidade do Samba and the Wikipedia article Samba school, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.