Set on Avenida Eusebio da Silva Ferreira in the central Sao Domingos de Benfica parish of northern Lisbon, the Estadio da Luz is the principal home stadium of the major Portuguese football club Sport Lisboa e Benfica and the largest single sporting venue anywhere in Portugal. The current stadium opened on 25 October 2003 and has a total seating capacity of approximately sixty-five thousand spectators across the four principal tiered sections of the bowl-shaped seating arrangement. The current stadium is the second principal home ground on the Avenida Eusebio da Silva Ferreira site, replacing the original 1954 Estadio da Luz that had been the principal home of the club continuously between 1954 and 2003. The original stadium had been substantially extended in stages during the 1980s and 1990s to a maximum capacity of around one hundred and twenty thousand spectators, making it the largest single football stadium anywhere in Europe at the time of the original peak capacity. The decision to demolish and rebuild was taken in around 2000 in preparation for the Euro 2004 European football championship hosted by Portugal. The current stadium was designed by the Portuguese architectural practice Damasio e Joao Lopes and was constructed between 2002 and 2003. The construction took around eighteen months from the initial site clearance through to the formal opening match on 25 October 2003, which featured Benfica playing against Uruguayan club Penarol in a friendly inauguration match. The total construction cost was approximately one hundred and sixty million euros, making the project one of the largest single Portuguese sporting infrastructure projects of the early 2000s. The stadium is the principal home of Sport Lisboa e Benfica, the most successful single Portuguese football club throughout the entire history of the wider modern Portuguese football tradition. The club has won the principal Portuguese national league title around thirty-eight times and the principal European Cup or Champions League trophy twice, in 1961 and 1962, under the legendary Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann. The current squad regularly competes in the principal UEFA Champions League competition each season alongside the various other major European football competitions. The supplementary Benfica Museum opened in 2013 on the lower level of the eastern stand of the stadium. The museum covers around three thousand square metres of dedicated exhibition space and provides a continuous chronological narrative of the wider history of the club continuously from the original foundation in 1904 through to the present day. The principal individual displays include the various historical playing kits, the original trophies from across the entire history of the club and the famous individual sections dedicated to the various legendary individual players including Eusebio, Mario Coluna, Jose Aguas and Antonio Simoes.

Type: Stadium / Arena

Address: Avenida Eusebio da Silva Ferreira, Lisbon, Portugal

Capacity: 65000

Opening Date: 25/10/2003