Estadio Modelo Alberto Spencer Herrera

Guayaquil has more than one football ground, but only this one carries a player's name rather than a club's. The renaming came in 2006, after Alberto Spencer died — Ecuador's most decorated forward, a man who built his career mostly abroad, in Uruguay, and whom the country chose to honour by putting his name on the venue rather than a statue alone.

The stadium itself has passed through Guayaquil's clubs more than settled with one. Club 9 de Octubre, Deportivo Everest, Rocafuerte, Patria, Panamá Sporting Club, Calvi and Norteamérica have all called it home at different points, none of them long enough to make the ground theirs alone — it functions more as the city's shared pitch than as any single side's fortress.

Work on the place has come in waves rather than one grand rebuild: a round of renovation in 1980, another in 2001, and then a longer rehabilitation in 2020 and 2021 under Roberto Ibáñez of Fedeguayas, when the stands were repaired and an automatic irrigation system went in along with new grass. That grass did not last as the final word — by October 2022 the decision had been made to replace the natural pitch with an artificial one, and by March 2023 the rolls of synthetic turf had already arrived on site for laying.

It sits on Avenida de las Américas, at the corner with Ing. Elías Jácome Guerrero, a fixed point in a stadium history that has otherwise been defined by change — of name, of tenants, of surface.