Estádio Municipal das Laranjeiras

Laranjeiras does not host football anymore, and that is precisely what sets it apart from every arena still filling a fixture list in Rio de Janeiro. It opened in May 1919 with a match between Brazil and Chile, in an era when the ground could pack in close to twenty thousand people for a fixture. That number has been sliding ever since: crowds crept up toward twenty-five thousand in the early 1920s, then fell hard when part of the stands came down in 1961 to make way for an overpass, leaving room for a fraction of the old capacity.

The ground has worn several names over the decades — Campo da Rua Guanabara, Estádio de Álvaro Chaves, Estádio das Laranjeiras among them — before Fluminense settled on honouring a former club president, renaming it Estádio Manoel Schwartz. Official competitive football left the venue years ago; since 2003 it has functioned as a training base and events space rather than a matchday home, its natural turf now serving sessions rather than fixtures.

It sits in the leafy Laranjeiras district, tucked into Rua Pinheiro Machado, a residential setting that had little room left to expand once the city grew up around it. What remains is less a stadium in regular use than a piece of the club's own history, kept close rather than filled.