The history of the Recife Popular Ballet begins in 1976, when the then municipal secretary of Education and Culture in Recife, Ariano Suassuna, and the artist and director André Luiz Madureira, decided to put on an experimental show with popular dances and entertainment.

Recife has an area of 210 square kilometers, which corresponds to 0.2% of the territorial extension of the State of Pernambuco.

METROREC was designed to serve 165,000 users per day. In December of 2002, the metro’s fleet was 25 trains, and each train in turn had four cars, each of them 22m long.

It is located in the current Bom Jesus Street, formerly known as Rua dos Judeus [Jewish Street], in the neighbourhood of Recife, and represented (from 1636 to 1654) the first official synagogue of the Jews who inhabited the Americas.

The idea to construct a public theatre in Recife came from the President of the Pernambuco Province at the time, Francisco do Rego Barros, Baron, Viscount and later Count of Boa Vista.