Estadio Alberto Gallardo

What sets the Estadio Alberto Gallardo apart in Lima is how many names it has carried without ever leaving Rímac. It opened as the Estadio Fray Martín de Porres, took the saint's full title after his canonisation the following year, and kept that name for half a century before the club settled on the one it bears now, honouring Alberto Gallardo Mendoza, the forward who defined an era for Sporting Cristal.

The naming came in 2012, decades after Gallardo's playing days, and it read less as a rebrand than as an overdue acknowledgement — the sort of thing clubs do for a player whose name already belonged to the ground in everything but signage.

Sporting Cristal has called it home since 1995, the year the club paid for a full reconstruction and, notably, brought in turf imported from the Netherlands rather than relaying a local pitch. That rebuild also reset the ground's capacity downward, a reminder that stadiums in Lima don't only grow — La Florida shrank from its original numbers and later shrank again when Peru's anti-violence legislation forced a stand closed, before settling near its present size.

There's no grand approach road or landmark address to point to; Avenida Zarumilla places it in the neighbourhood rather than on a map anyone outside Rímac would recognise, which fits a ground that has always mattered more to the club and the district around it than to the city at large.