Mestalla Stadium

This guide to Mestalla Stadium in Valencia opens with the single grandstand left standing after the Spanish Civil War, when the ground was requisitioned as a concentration camp and stripped for scrap. It follows the local architects who rebuilt a stadium out of that ruin, fast enough for Valencia to win a league title by nineteen forty-one. The guide also turns to a very different kind of crisis under a later owner, one fought with balance sheets rather than barbed wire. Look up at the terrace's steep incline, among the steepest in European football, built to bring the noise close.