Fuenlabrada

Fuenlabrada fits entirely within one person's lifetime: in 1960 it was a village of 2,908 inhabitants and by 1980 it already neared 65,000, a more than twentyfold increase in two decades fuelled by the mass arrival of workers from Extremadura, Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha seeking affordable housing in the south of Madrid. Today it exceeds 190,000 and is one of the region's great industrial, working-class cities, with a young population, its industrial estates and a campus of the Rey Juan Carlos University. That speed — from village to mid-sized city in a single generation — defines its character.

Sport is a municipal hallmark with a figure that captures it: Fuenlabrada devotes around 8% of its municipal budget to sport, well above the European average of 2-3%. The city sustains two professional clubs: Baloncesto Fuenlabrada, founded in 1983 and with some twenty seasons in the ACB League, which plays at the Fernando Martín Arena (opened in 1991, 5,700 seats), and CF Fuenlabrada, which reached the Second Division in 2019 and plays at the Fernando Torres Stadium. In its year as European City of Sport, according to estimates reported by the press, it hosted 133 sporting events with more than 70,000 participants.

Fuenlabrada received from ACES Europe the title of European City of Sport 2019, with an ACES quality seal that its facilities earned by exceeding 80% of the evaluated indicators. The recognition places it in the long Spanish trail of the ACES network — opened by Madrid as the first European Capital of Sport in 2001 — and alongside Granada, Soria and Igualada in the 2019 cohort.