Centro de Treinamento Cidade do Galo

Cidade do Galo is not a stadium at all, and Atlético Mineiro have never dressed it up as one. It is a working training ground for the professional squad, tucked off the MG-424 highway in Vespasiano, and the club's own website lists it under "patrimônio" rather than among its match venues.

The name itself — City of the Rooster, after the club's mascot — only became official in the mid-2000s and was registered with Brazil's industrial property institute in December 2007, though staff and press had been using it informally for a couple of years before that. The complex spreads across roughly 245,000 square metres and now runs to seven pitches, alongside a hotel for the first team, built in 2006, a pool and dedicated medical facilities.

Most of the surfaces are natural grass, kept for first-team sessions, but field three switched to synthetic turf in November 2023 — 60mm fibres filled with quartz sand and an organic infill — specifically to let the club extend training hours without wearing the ground down. A separate stretch of the site, added when three new pitches went in during 2017, carries a small stand that can hold up to a thousand spectators, though that is a training-pitch amenity rather than anything resembling a stadium bowl.

Exactly when the current site opened is not settled. Some accounts point to 2001 as the year it became the club's main base, others to 2006 as the point the expanded facility and hotel were finished, and there is also a reference to work on the first pitch going back as far as 1982.