Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos

Before the roof and the renovation, there was a bicycle track. It ran around the pitch for decades, a hard concrete band that kept fans back from the touchline, until the 1962 World Cup rebuild tore it out and replaced it with galleries — the change that let the Estadio Nacional swell into one of the largest grounds in South America.

The ground itself sits on land that was farmland before 1918, given over by Domingo Cañas, and the design that went up in the late 1930s borrowed its lines from Berlin's Olympic Stadium. Colo-Colo christened it in a friendly against a Brazilian side, winning 6–3, and the club has treated it as home territory ever since.

The most recent closure, in 2009, was meant to modernise the stadium and the wider sports complex around it, and it did — but not on schedule. The earthquake of February 2010 forced the Piñera government to shelve the roof work on financial grounds, and the venue reopened that September instead, timed to Chile's bicentennial rather than to any sporting fixture.

What the ground plays on has shifted with the times too: current listings describe a GrassMaster hybrid surface, the reinforced turf increasingly common at stadiums that host both club football and heavier annual schedules.