Estádio Ilha do Retiro - Sport Recife Stadium Guide

Officially known as Estádio Adelmar da Costa Carvalho, the stadium was inaugurated on July 4th 1937 with a friendly match between home side Club Recife and state rivals, Santa Cruz. Officially named after Adelmar da Costa Carvalho, the former club president who presided over the ground’s creation, fans commonly refer to it as Estádio Ilha do Retiro after the neighbourhood it is located within.

Constructed by Sport Recife on a small 17-hectre ranch, the stadium was one of the first to be built in the city and was subsequently used as one of six venues to host matches of the 1950 World Cup. Ilha do Retiro was expanded to a capacity of around 20,000 and successfully hosted a match between Chile and the United States with the South American’s winning by a convincing 5-2 margin.

With the public appetite for football growing throughout the 20th century the stadium underwent a handful of expansions with the stadium’s capacity peaking at just under 60,000 towards the end of the 1990s. The record attendance was set at 56,875 when Recife took on Atlético Clube do Porto for the rights to be crowned winners of the Pernambucano Football Championship.

Today Ilha do Retiro’s capacity sits comfortably at 35,000 following the introduction of increasingly safety conscious stadium legislation, with the black and red ground recognised as one of the best stadiums in Brazil by famous newspaper “Lance!” . Still, it was not selected as one of the twelve stadiums of the 2014 World Cup with the newly constructed Itaipava Arena Pernambuco chosen to represent the local region instead.

Estádio Ilha do Retiro is comprised of four stands: North, East, South and West.

Click the thumbnails above to enlarge an image of each stand and to read a more detailed description of each part of the Stadium.