Arena Castilian

The building standing today opened its gates in 1973, when Ceará and Fortaleza met in a goalless friendly to christen the pitch, and the arena carries the name of Plácido Aderaldo Castelo, shortened by locals into the diminutive that stuck: Castelão.

What sets it apart from other Brazilian venues of its generation is the sheer scale of what has passed through it. In 1980, Pope John Paul II drew a crowd estimated at 122,000. A Brazil–Uruguay match the same year pulled in close to 118,500. Those numbers now sit only in the record books; the ground was rebuilt for the 2013 Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup, when it hosted a Brazil quarter-final against Colombia, and reopened with a capacity fixed at 63,903.

Fortaleza and Ceará still share it as home ground. The pitch is natural grass, kept that way by agreement between the two clubs. Beyond football, the Castelão has doubled as a concert stage for acts including Paul McCartney, Beyoncé and Iron Maiden, and the modern attendance mark was set only recently, in November 2024, when 63,908 turned out for a Ceará–América-MG derby.