Estádio do Dragão

Estádio do Dragão opened on 16 November 2003 with a friendly between Porto and Barcelona, played that same evening — a deliberate statement from a club that had just torn down its old ground, the Estádio das Antas, to build here. The name itself was contested before construction finished: some at the club wanted to keep the Antas name alive, others pushed for a tribute to past presidents, but Dragão — the club's own emblem — won out.

The pitch is the detail worth lingering on. Porto uses a hybrid surface, GrassMax, where synthetic fibres are stitched into the natural turf every two centimetres and anchored eighteen centimetres down, a reinforcement method rather than a plastic overlay. It paid off: the surface was rated the best in the league for the 2023/24 season.

Building it was not cheap. The project ran to 125 million euros between 2001 and 2003, with the Portuguese state contributing just over 18 million of that, and the construction firm Somague carrying out the work to a design by architect Manuel Salgado of Atelier Risco.

The ground sits in Porto's Campanhã district, on Rua Manuel Moreira de Barros, and has stood as Porto's only home since the Antas came down — no groundshare, no former tenant to compare it against.