Estádio Presidente Vargas

The Presidente Vargas sits in Benfica, and it has none of the scale of Castelão across town — which is precisely the point. This is the one where Ferroviário and Floresta play out their Série C and Série D campaigns.

It opened in 1941 as the Estádio Municipal, before the city renamed it for Getúlio Vargas in the early 1950s — a gesture that stuck long after the politics around it faded. What has not faded is the ground's habit of being called on when it is needed rather than when it is scheduled: Ceará and Fortaleza, the city's two heavyweights, turn up here on occasion, usually when Castelão is unavailable or when a smaller, tighter crowd suits the fixture better.

The pitch tells its own story of upkeep. A Bermuda Celebration surface, laid in 2023 to FIFA standard, replaced what had come before, a quiet acknowledgement that a stadium built to hold over twenty thousand still has to earn its place on the fixture list on the strength of its playing surface, not its history alone.

Attendance here has always been argued about more than confirmed. The figure most trusted, from a Ferroviário–Ceará derby in May 1989, put the crowd at just over thirty-eight thousand — packed well past any modern comfort. Older claims of a crowd near forty thousand for a Ceará–Corinthians tie in 1971 persist locally, but nothing stands behind them with certainty. Since the ground was rebuilt in 2011 and 2012, the biggest crowd on record, for a Fortaleza match in November 2012, has stayed a good deal short of that.