Couto Pereira

For 45 years the ground in Alto da Glória carried a name borrowed from somewhere else entirely: Estádio Belfort Duarte, after a player and director of América do Rio de Janeiro. Major Antônio Couto Pereira, president of Coritiba Foot Ball Club, chose that name as a temporary measure. It held for four and a half decades. Only on 28 February 1977 did the club put his own name on it.

What the stadium was in 1932 bears almost no relation to what it became. At the inaugural match it took in around 1,500 people. By the late 1970s, once the three-ring curves behind the goals were finished, it could take more than 60,000. The record for football came on 15 May 1983, when 67,391 watched the Campeonato Brasileiro semi-final second leg between Atlético Paranaense and Flamengo, played here, with Atlético winning 2–0. Three years earlier a crowd in the same range had come for something else: on 5 July 1980 Pope John Paul II celebrated a Mass dedicated to Curitiba's Polish colony.

The ground has been shrinking since, and for a reason. The turf is Bermuda 419.

Coritiba play here. So, lately, have Paul McCartney, Coldplay, Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.