Estádio Municipal Eng.º Manuel Branco Teixeira

The name over the entrance belongs to a man Chaves buried in 2010. Manuel Branco Teixeira had served as mayor of the town, and within the same year as his death the municipal ground was renamed in his honour — Estádio Municipal Eng.º Manuel Branco Teixeira, engineer's title and all. It is a naming of a particular kind: not a sponsor, not a saint, not a date, but a local administrator whose decisions the people walking through the turnstiles could remember first-hand.

For the six decades before that, the ground gave nothing away in its name. It was the Estádio Municipal de Chaves, which is what a town calls its stadium when it has only the one, and it had been that since 1949 — old enough that the renaming came to a place already fixed in local habit rather than to a new build looking for an identity.

The capacity sits at 8,400. That figure says something about the town it serves: room for a crowd that a place the size of Chaves can actually produce, rather than a bowl built for occasions that come once a decade. The pitch is natural grass, as it was when the ground opened.