Heliodoro Rodríguez López Stadium

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Leisure · Subcategory: Sports · Year: 1925

This sports venue is the football ground where the island's representative team plays: Club Deportivo Tenerife.

From 1922, the year the club was founded, until some years later, Tenerife played its first matches at the Miraflores ground, located at the upper part of the street of the same name, opposite what is now Plaza Militar. Miraflores was a small ground with limited capacity to accommodate fans, so the board of directors looked for a new place for their matches, this time located in what was then called Finca Cañadas, next to the dirt road of San Sebastián. 

The new ground was called Stadium and was inaugurated on 25 July 1925 with a match between Tenerife and Marino de Gran Canaria, with the Tinerfeños winning two goals to one. The venue was a dirt pitch (105 x 67 metres) framed by wooden fences and had a capacity for seven thousand people. It also had changing rooms, showers and a "first aid kit".

After the civil war, with Heliodoro Rodríguez López as president, there was an intention to renovate and improve the old Stadium. In February 1946, architect Enrique Marrero Regalado presented the plans for what would be the new stadium. It was a modern venue equipped with better stands, an innovative grandstand, a façade with a portal that is still preserved today; all with a marked baroque and regionalist style, which was fashionable at that time. It was inaugurated in September 1947. Three years later, president Heliodoro Rodríguez López, a great promoter of the new stadium, died, and from then on the stadium would bear his name.

In the summer of 1952, the playing surface changed from dirt to grass and in 1955 it was equipped with rudimentary floodlights for night matches. 

In 1971, the Heliodoro Rodríguez López was acquired by the Cabildo Insular, due to the club's serious financial situation, and after years of deterioration, the institution undertook a major renovation commissioned to architect Carlos Schwartz. The works lasted three decades (1986-2001) and left us with a completely different stadium from the original, preserving only the original portal and a huge Indian laurel tree that had been there since the early days.

In this venue on San Sebastián street, extraordinary sporting events have taken place, especially historic football matches; but also other types of entertainment events such as concerts, folk festivals, charity galas, the reception of the Three Wise Men, etc.

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