Gimnastic

On a September evening in 1947, a side that had never previously played a single match in Spain's top flight travelled to Madrid and beat Real Madrid 3-1 at the newly opened Santiago Bernabéu — the first team ever to win there, in what was also Gimnàstic's debut season in La Liga.

The club itself goes back much further than that afternoon. It was formed on 1 March 1886 as a gymnastics society, making it the oldest sports club still standing in Spain, and football only became its own section in 1914, when Gimnàstic absorbed Club Olímpic de Tarragona. The merger is also why the team plays in red, white and black — colours carried over from the side it swallowed.

That win at the Bernabéu marked a peak the club would not see again for a long time. Relegated from La Liga in 1950, Nàstic spent the next nineteen seasons grinding through the Tercera División, picking up six regional titles there and two Segunda División B championships on the way back up. Valero Serer became the man supporters measured everything against, scoring 181 goals for the club between 1959 and 1970, still the record.

La Liga returned only once more, in 2005/06, ending a 56-year wait. Rubén Castro and Javier Portillo led the attack, Albano Bizzarri kept goal, and the club still went straight back down, leaving debts of around €10m and a real threat of bankruptcy behind it. Former president Josep Maria Andreu is credited with keeping the club alive through it. Nàstic worked its way back to Segunda in 2014/15 before dropping to Segunda B again in 2018/19.

For years the fixture that mattered most was the Derbi de Tarragona against CF Reus Deportiu, the city's other club, where the league table went out of the window and local pride settled the argument instead. That rivalry no longer exists: a court dissolved Reus in 2020 after debts and an expulsion from the professional leagues the previous year, leaving Nàstic without the opponent it had measured itself against for longest.