Stadiums gone and missed: Belenenses’s Campo das Salésias | OneFootball

It was once Portugal’s greatest and most modern football ground. The best grass pitch in the land, a statement of intent for a footballing nation that was starting to realise how important the game was becoming.

The Salésias was more than just a football temple. It was a way into the future that also ushered in Os Belenenses greatest era, a time when the Belém Blue and Whites were considered on a par with the Big Three of Benfica, Sporting and Porto that we know today.

Like many of Portugal’s football clubs, Belenenses’ Salésias stadium was built to host an array of different sports (Photo: www.osbelenenses.com)

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The views from the Restelo stadium are some of the most stunning of any football ground in the world. From the stands, you can contemplate the immensity of the Tagus River, the redness of the towering 25 April bridge and the Cristo Rei statue on the south bank, greeting everyone who passes by. The Belém Tower and the Jerónimos nearby remind us how, once, Lisbon was one of the most important capital cities in the world.

The stadium is beautiful from the inside and the outside, and it is also a landmark of football in the capital, as it was in those grounds where not only Belenenses started to kick a ball, but also the likes of Casa Pia and SL Benfica as well. Why then, looking back, do many Belenenses supporters look at the now-gone Salésias stadium with such fond memories? The answer is, because, regardless of the beauty of the Restelo, it was never as modern and as futuristic as the Salésias had once been, and it also never hosted as much on-pitch success as the club’s previous ground.

The memory of the Salésias is not lost. Nowadays, there’s a training ground where the club’s youth academy regularly trains, the blue and white kits returning to the place where they first became nationwide celebrities. It is as if the aura of the old could pass on to the generations of today and tomorrow. Ten years have gone by since the Salésias was reinaugurated and Belenenses have come a long way since.

Winning the devastating conflict with the former owners of the SAD, the Codecity company, which kept on playing in the top tier as BSAD for a few seasons, was an important step. Belenenses also managed to briefly return to the second tier and professional football after having been reestablished, starting from scratch, although they are now in Liga 3 again, with the goal of getting back as soon as possible into the elite.

When it was inaugurated in 1928, the Campo das Salésias had the biggest capacity of any sports stadium in Portugal (Photo: www.osbelenenses.com)

At the core of the club’s identity

Remembering the importance of the Salésias in the club’s identity is a major step in reassessing what Belenenses are all about. After all, this was the team that, for many, remains as Portugal’s fourth biggest club. The first – and for half a century the only one – ever to win the league bar the likes of Porto, Benfica and Sporting. A multiple Portuguese Cup winner and a decisive institution in the first decades of the game in Portugal. Most of that glorious time was spent at the Salésias, and that also helps to explain the mythical status of the ground.

The Campo José Manuel Soares – later named after the deceased footballer Pepe, a club icon – was most commonly known as Campo das Salésias or Estádio das Salésias, because of the place name where it was originally built. It was near Rua Alexandre Santos, in the Ajuda neighbourhood of western Lisbon, that the ground turned into one of the most modern football stadiums in the Iberian Peninsula at the time, ranking alongside Athletic Club’s San Mamés in Bilbao, Barcelona’s Les Corts, Real Madrid’s Chamartín and Atlético Madrid’s Metropolitano. It was 1928 when the facilities were first inaugurated, two years after a military coup ended what had been sixteen disastrous years for the Republican movement.

The Ajuda area was bursting with life and had birthed many football clubs and footballers over the previous decades. Closer to the city centre than the Restelo area where the club would eventually move, the Salésias meant Belenenses were now considered part of the big guys. The club had only come to be nine years earlier when some footballers became fed up of playing for clubs from the other parts of the city. Sport Lisboa moved to Benfica to become Sport Lisboa e Benfica and Sporting was quietly settled in the Campo Grande area, so those residing in and around the Ajuda borough decided it was time for them to have a club of their own.

Belenenses in action at what was the first stadium with a grass pitch in Portugal (Photo: www.osbelenenses.com)

The main man behind the idea was Portugal’s first great superstar, Artur José Pereira, a brilliantly talented footballer who had been born in the neighbourhood and later became famed as a Benfica player. He, alongside his brother and several players from Benfica and Sporting, decided to break away from their former clubs and begin competing with the Christ Cross as their symbol, representing the influential role that the Restelo and Ajuda areas had played in the inception of the Portuguese colonial empire.

They started to play in the Campo de Pau de Fio and quickly enrolled in the Lisbon Regional championship, one they soon began to win as well, the first trophy coming in 1926, only seven years after the club had been founded. With Augusto Silva and the young Pepe as rising stars, Belenenses, alongside new neighbours Casa Pia, menaced the status quo of Benfica and Sporting during those years. They soon outgrew the Campo de Pau de Fio and were looking for a new home when the Salésias grounds became available.

Portugal’s biggest and best stadium

Works began as early as 1926, and the stadium was finally inaugurated on 29 January. It included a tarmac track for the staging of different sports. Belenenses, much like all other Portuguese clubs of the day, was unashamedly a multi-sports club, and the new facility could host up to 20,000 people, making it the biggest in the country. It was also the first to sport a covered stand for the convenience of the club members. Well rooted within the local architecture, it was a stadium that connected well with the club’s spirit of representing the western Lisbon bohemian and ambitious identity.

The whole ground was so astoundingly modern that it soon became the unofficial home of the Portuguese national side, and would remain so whenever they played in Lisbon up until the opening of the Jamor National Stadium in 1944. It was at Salésias that the local players Artur Quaresma, Simões and Amaro refused to perform the fascist salute when the Francoist Spanish side came to town, after a previous friendly had been played in Vigo. For that, the players were arrested and only released because some high-profile members of the military and Salazar’s cabinet were also Belenenses supporters.

For much of the time Belenenses played at Salésias they were a match for or better than the strongest teams in Portugal (Photo: www.osbelenenses.com)

It was a trend for the following decades as the club that had begun as a symbol of the local community quickly evolved into one closer to the fascist regime, more than their founders would have probably wanted. By then, the Salésias also hosted many Cup finals, and they watched how Belenenses quickly rose to national prominence, even if they had to endure the tragic loss of Pepe, poisoned with arsenic by his own mother’s ill-judgement, at a tender age in 1931.

In the 1930s, Belenenses reinforced their status as a national powerhouse, inspiring clubs in different regions of the country to take shape. In 1937 the Salésias was upgraded to become the first ground in Portugal with a grass pitch rather than a dirt pitch. Not only that, but it was the first to sport bathrooms – for men and women alike – and both dressing rooms enjoyed hot water, a commodity few grounds enjoyed back then. Coached by Cândido de Oliveira, the side became regular title contenders, winning the Campeonato de Portugal in 1931. When the league was eventually formed, first as a trial in 1934, and then officially in 1939, Belenenses almost always in the top four.

Championship triumph

Their sole win came in 1946, after they had won the Cup in 1942, in their third consecutive final, and been runners-up in the two previous seasons. It was the club’s golden hour, and the matches played at the Salésias were key to the side’s success in their title-winning season, as they remained undefeated at home and only failed to win one of their matches there. In fact, Belenenses’ prestige was such that they were invited by Santiago Bernabéu to play Real Madrid in the inauguration of the new Chamartín the following year.

Come the following decade, the signings of Matateu and his younger brother Vicente helped the club keep a high-profile. For a while Belenenses seemed close to winning a second league title, but it never materialised.

Belenenses 1945/46, champions of Portugal (Photo: www.imortaisdofutebol.com)

But why did Belenenses have to move out of such a brilliant ground where they had enjoyed so much success? Like Benfica, who had been expelled from Lumiar years before, Belenenses got evicted by the city hall, which wanted to build a highway on the land where the stadium was located. In return, contrary to what happened with the Eagles, the local cabinet offered a new patch of land in Restelo, with a view over the river and the Jerónimos monastery. Construction began in 1954, and in the same campaign, Belenenses could have won the league on the final day, only to be beaten by Sporting, a defeat that granted Benfica the title win.

The following season was the last one for Salésias with the new Estádio do Restelo inaugurated in September 1956, with the main figures of the fascist regime in attendance for the opening ceremony, against Sporting. Two days later, the new ground, covered practically in its entirety, also inaugurated its floodlights, which was a novelty in Portugal, in a match against Stade Reims, who had just lost the European Cup final against Real Madrid. Belenenses won both matches with Matateu on the scoresheet.

From then on, the club remained closely associated with a ground that remains, to this day, their home and that hosted not only memorable football matches but also iconic music concerts benefiting of its remarkable location in Lisbon’s grandiose landscape.

Salésias abandoned then resurrected

The Salésias was abandoned, but the highway was never built. In fact, nothing was, and after years of indecision about what was going to happen with those now neglected lands, it became a forgotten place, for decades left to rot. The only indication of its former glory was a memorial plaque that remembered it had been Portugal’s first grass pitch, standing next to what had become a disused overgrown field with two goals on it. The Salésias remained an estranged place, a memory of a golden age that was seemingly not coming back.

The Salésias ground was abandoned for years (Photo: www.osbelenenses.com)

By the 1960s, Belenenses had started to become a shadow of who they once were, and after the Carnation Revolution, things got worse. They were relegated for the first time in their history, managed to return to the top and win the 1989 Portuguese Cup, but then plunged again into the lower tiers, becoming a yo-yo club ever since. When the Codecity company bought the majority of the club’s share to run the football division, a scion became inevitable with Belenenses, the football club, starting from the bottom of the pyramid, while BSAD, the company who own the competitive licence, played in the first division until the club was relegated and then disbanded.

The whole drama surrounding the possibility of one of Portugal’s biggest sporting institutions facing the menace of disappearing altogether brought back a sense of nostalgia, and with it the Salésias memory took shape once again. The club managed to persuade the city hall to restore to the club the ground where the stadium once was, and in 2016, construction works began so that the youth teams could enjoy a place to train that was deeply rooted in the club’s legacy.

After years of neglect, the Salésias ground was restored and is now part of Belenenses’s youth football facilities (Photo: www.zerozero.pt)

Belenenses will probably never play again at the Salésias, but that doesn’t mean the ground was forgotten, and now it is part of a club that is looking for a way out from the shadows to return to their former self. Indeed in bygone times the crowd popularised the expression “15 minutes Belenenses style” in an era when the Cruz de Cristo club were one of most formidable sides in the Iberian Peninsula.