The spotlight is firmly on Rio De Janeiro in the run up to the Olympic games, but this often doesn’t include the favelas of the city where 25% of its residents actually reside.

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As many of you probably know, the favelas are areas without any foundations that are generally made out of junk and trash because the poorer residents of the city literally had no other option but to find shelter that way. Having said that, the people there aren’t as unhappy as you might think, and many of the residents have helped develop them in ways that they never thought possible. Others do have to turn to crime to help fund their existence though, which is probably the overarching impression that most people have of the favelas.

Vox went inside Rio’s favelas to try and educate people about what they were all about ahead of the run up to the 2016 Olympics:

There’s a lot more than meets the eye going on in those places hey, and it looks like the good outweighs the bad in most of them. It seems like they’re always going to be the phenomenon that they are and the ‘city within a city’ that the documentary talked about though as I can’t really ever see them getting taken over or sorted out. It seems like most people within them are happy enough though.

For more on Rio’s favelas, check out this insane shootout between cops in a police helicopter and some drug dealers in a car on the ground. Would probably be better if they could cut that aspect of the favelas out.