São Paulo's carnival competition
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every year during Brazil’s carnival celebrations, samba schools are tasked with creating elaborate parades based around a unique theme, from which they build huge floats, compose a song, and choreograph an entire visual spectacle. Tom Raine follows one of São Paulo’s oldest samba schools, Águia de Ouro, in the final stages of creating their carnival parade for their most important event of the year - parading in São Paulo’s iconic Sambadrome in the attendance of thousands of people, and millions more watching on TV across Brazil. This year they have chosen a theme titled Amsterdam: City of Liberty, celebrating the cities’ values of freedom, tolerance and modernity. It is not just a celebration but a fierce competition, with rigorous judging and a football-style league system of promotion and relegation. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world’s most creative people.
Transcript
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| 0:35.2 | The Gift. |
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| 0:41.0 | Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:45.6 | I'm Tom Rain, and for the next three weeks, I'll be following the preparations of one of San Paulo's top Samba schools, Agiaji Jorou, as they gear up to compete for their most important event of the year, |
| 0:56.2 | parading in the iconic San Paulo Sambodrome in the attendance of thousands of people and millions more watching on TV across Brazil. |
| 1:03.8 | They'll be competing against 13 of the Samba schools in the Grupo Especial, |
| 1:08.1 | the Premier Division of Sambaos in the city of San Paulo. |
| 1:11.5 | The schools will be judged on everything from their percussion, composition and choreography, |
| 1:15.7 | to their technical skill, their costumes, and of course their floats |
| 1:19.2 | that have been painstakingly designed, built and painted over the course of the last year. |
| 1:25.6 | The performance itself will only last an hour, but it will stay in the |
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