to cause a public scene
Catarina armou o maior barraco na frente da casa do próprio irmão.
Catarina caused the biggest scene in front of her own brother's house.
In Brazil a barraco is a flimsy, improvised shack thrown together out of whatever is at hand. From that image grew the slang armar um barraco ("to pitch a shack"): just as a shack is hastily erected in plain view, the phrase came to mean staging a loud, makeshift scene in public — shouting, quarrelling and making a spectacle.
Source: Priberam.
Falando's Idiom Trainer teaches you to recognize idiom meanings and create sentences using them, so you can speak like a Brazilian.
