Estadio Municipal de La Cisterna

Estadio Municipal de La Cisterna was not designed by architects looking for a legacy; it was built by the local council as a job creation scheme to keep men off the streets after the economic crash of the early eighties.

Palestino have called it home for decades, and the club has kept the original name without selling the rights to a sponsor. The pitch is natural grass, though the lines are sometimes faint near the corners. You can see the new white seats installed in the main stand, which replaced the old concrete benches, a change that brought the official number of people allowed inside down to six thousand. Before that, the numbers were much higher, and the spot still holds the record for the biggest crowd: eleven thousand six hundred and eighty people watching a draw against the capital’s giants in the late eighties.

The view from the top of the concrete tower shows the whole oval shape, nothing fancy, just a rectangle of green surrounded by grey stone. There is a new electronic board now, and lights were put up last year so games can go on after dark. It is not a pretty place, but the players know it well. When the women’s national team came for their first match here against Peru, they played on the same turf used by the men’s senior side. The surface is different under the floodlights, but the ground remains the same.