Cisne

Pontevedra is not a big city. Club Cisne started out in 1964 as something broader still — an association that also covered athletics, basketball and canoeing — before narrowing to handball alone in 1970. It settled into the Pabellón Municipal de los Deportes, a hall built for 4,000, and into a rivalry with SD Teucro that the city calls the Derbi do Lérez.

For decades that meant regional football and a youth academy that quietly did the real work: six Galician youth titles, three junior championships, four cadet championships. Pablo Domínguez ran that academy and helped shape the pipeline that later fed the senior side; Alberto Casares came through it to play in Liga ASOBAL with Balonmano Cangas, a reminder of what the production line could produce even before the first team caught up with it.

The first team caught up in 2019-2020, when Cisne won the División de Honor Plata and went up to Liga ASOBAL for the first time. It did not last: a 16th-place finish sent them straight back down. They won the silver division again in 2021-2022, went up again, and were relegated again after finishing bottom in 2022-2023 under coach Javier Márquez. There was a Supercopa de Galicia final that same season, lost to Cangas, and another final reached in 2024-2025. Alejandro Conde and Carlos Pombo have been named as the figures behind that more recent push. It is still, underneath it, the same club that once trained rowers and athletes alongside handball players before deciding which sport it actually wanted to be.