Lego presents Olympic model of Rio city ahead of games

Lego, the world’s biggest toymaker, has developed a large model of Rio de Janeiro city to celebrate the host of the 2016 Olympic Games, set to open in a few days.

The model is the largest ever made for Latin America by the group and took 50 Lego builders some 2,500 hours altogether to create over one year, according to Lego master model builder Paul Chrzan.

"Three different countries were involved in creating all of the icons that are seen here,” Chrzan said, gesturing to the structure.

"We did create 25 different icons of Rio - they are all visible here," he added.

The miniature city features the Olympic rings, stadiums and iconic sites in Rio, all made from just under one million colorful plastic bricks.

"The really crazy thing about this is there are 10 different scales going on. If we did it in one scale the stadium would be that big," Chrzan said, using his hand to indicate the stadium would be very small.

"So, it's everything that we could fit into the city, in a 5 meter by 6 meter (yard) space."

The structure is composed of roughly 953,000 pieces of Lego, according to Chrzan.

Lego, in partnership with the Danish government, created the model as a legacy gift to Rio de Janeiro.

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