San Mamés Stadium
The pitch at San Mamés sits 7.8 metres below street level, so when you descend into the bowl for the first time, the scale of it arrives all at once — 53,331 seats stacked in three steep tiers, the white ETFE roof catching the Basque light overhead. This is Athletic Club's ground, and Athletic Club's alone: a club that has never been relegated from La Liga and has always fielded players from the Basque Country.
The current stadium opened on 16 September 2013, just 102 days after the last match was played on the old site. César Azcárate Gómez and the IDOM firm kept the address and the name, but built something entirely new around a pitch that now meets UEFA standard in every dimension.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to walk Pozas Street about two hours before kick-off — the pintxos bars fill early and the chanting starts well before anyone's inside. On non-match days, the 45-minute pitch-level tour earns its ticket price: standing in the away changing room, then walking the tunnel to the edge of the grass, reorients the whole stadium.
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How San Mamés Stadium came to be
The original San Mamés opened on 21 August 1913, designed by Manuel Maria Smith with an initial capacity of 7,000. Its first match was a replay of the Copa del Rey Final against Racing Club de Irún; the first goal was scored by the player known as Pichichi, whose name now graces La Liga's top-scorer award. The ground was expanded in 1952 and renovated again for the 1982 FIFA World Cup.
Planning for a replacement began in 2004, with ground broken on 26 May 2010. When Athletic played their last La Liga match at the old stadium — a 0–1 loss to Levante on 26 May 2013 — three-quarters of the new structure already surrounded it. The old ground was demolished around and beneath the new one, leaving the same address, the same name, and a roof extension that was completed in November 2016.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.