Article updated: 17/04/2026
On 27 September 1987, over 70 years of footballing heritage came to an end when Cartagena Fútbol Club played the last match at the old Estadio El Almarjal. After coming so close to promotion to La Primera at the end of the previous season and with a new stadium on the horizon, the fans of Cartagena FC could have been forgiven for thinking that their club was on the cusp of the big time. Unfortunately for them, things were about to take a turn for the worse. Forced to leave their old stadium before their new stadium was complete, the team played 12 miles up the road at the municipal stadium in Torre Pacheco. This arrangement lasted from October to January, before the new Estadio Cartagonova finally opened for business on 7 February 1988 with a scoreless draw against Real Burgos. The new stadium was almost an exact copy of Barcelona’s Mini Estadi and took its name from the Roman name for the ancient city of Cartagena.
Clearly, the fact that the club had three home stadiums in one season didn’t help matters, but only one win on their travels also showed that the problems lay a lot deeper than a bit of disruption at home. By the end of the 1987-88 season, Cartagena FC had finished bottom of La Segunda, seven points from safety. The club set about the task of returning to the second division and over the next six seasons came close on two occasions, losing on the final day of the playoff group in 1991 (to Racing Santander) & 1992 (to CD Badajoz). These efforts saw the club accrue large debts, and when they failed to pay their players at the end of the 94-95 season, the club was relegated to the Tercera. Disenchanted with how the club was being run, local businessman Florentino Manzano set up Cartagonova Fútbol Club, and within a season, the fledgling club found itself in the Tercera along with Cartagena FC. Alas, there was to be no local derby as Cartagena FC folded five games into the season, leaving Cartagonova FC to take over the mantle of the city’s senior club. By the summer of 1998, the new club had won a place in Segunda B, dominating the regular season, and then topping the playoff group that featured Pinoso, Tortosa & Constancia.
At the time of inauguration and until the opening of the Nueva Condomina in 2006, the Estadio Cartagonovo was clearly head and shoulders above anything else in the Región of Murcia. The stadium was designed by Catalan architects Josep Casals and Ramón Domènech, who, unsurprisingly, were responsible for Barcelona’s Mini Estadi. Upon opening, the stadium consisted of two overlapping tiers, the upper seated, whilst the lower had seats on the sides, but was terraced behind the goals. This gave the ground a capacity of 20,000, but this was later reduced to 15,105 when it was converted to an all-seated arena in 2000. Over the west side hangs a sleek cantilevered roof, which stands slightly higher on its mountings than the version at the Mini Estadi. On 26 January 2000, La Selección beat Poland 3-0 in a friendly international, the first match that the senior national side played in the region of Murcia.
The club spent the next eleven seasons in Segunda B, reaching the playoffs on three occasions. In 2003, Cartagonova FC changed its name to Fútbol Club Cartagena. It also changed its club crest, which now closely matches that of the previous senior clubs from the city. On winning its second Segunda B title in 2008-09, FC Cartagena disposed of Alcoyano 3-2 on aggregate to win promotion to La Segunda for the first time, and 21 years after its predecessor. That first season in the second tier saw the club remain promotion candidates until the final few weeks, before finishing fifth. The Estadio Cartagonova did undergo an €800,000 refit during the summer of 2010. Improvements were made to the floodlights, pitch drainage and media facilities, whilst the pitch-side fences were removed. All of which led to a small reduction in the capacity to 14,532.
Based on the club’s impressive first season in La Segunda, the municipality drew up plans to extend the stadium. The first option would see the construction of an additional tier of 7,000 seats on the three open sides of the ground. The second, and cheaper alternative would see the pitch lowered a few metres and an additional six rows of seats being installed around all four sides of the ground. Similar work has been carried out at Valencia, Villarreal and tellingly, Castellón, which, like Barça B, has an almost identical stadium to FC Cartagena. Lack of municipal funds and FC Cartagena’s failure to come close to promotion to La Primera put an end to the plans.
The 2010-11 season saw a more restrained, but still creditable 13th-place finish. However, the 2011-12 season was a struggle from start to finish, with Cartagena hovering around the relegation zone throughout. To add to the club’s woes, the home match on 7 April 2012 against Celta Vigo was abandoned on the hour mark when an assistant referee was struck by a coin thrown from the crowd. The remaining 31 minutes were played a month later behind closed doors, by which time, Cartagena was already condemned to relegation. Over the next eight seasons, Cartagena reached the playoffs on five occasions, but only secured promotion back to La Segunda in 2020, with a playoff win on penalties against Atlético Baleares. Five seasons in La Segunda followed, but the club never mounted a serious bid at promotion to the top tier before dropping to the Primera Federación in 2025.
Promotion to La Segunda in 2020 saw €750,000 spent on bringing the Estadio Cartagonova up to the required stadard for the top two tiers of Spanish football. This included the installation of a new pitch and ittirgation system, new meida facilities, New TV & VAR gantries and improvement to spectator ameneties.
Estadios de España 