Sports
The city has a soccer team called Club de Deportes La Serena which plays in the First Division of the Chilean league of football. Their home games are played at the La Portada stadium, which has a capacity of approximately 18,000 seats. Their biggest rival is Coquimbo Unido. They are nicknamed "Los Papayeros", because of the papayas that are grown near La Serena in the Elqui Valley.
Since 2007, there is a tournament professional tennis, the Challenger de La Serena, in the fields of the Campus Trentino of the University of the Mar, in which the first champion was the Argentine tennis player Mariano Zabaleta. The above mentioned enclosure was the location for the series of the Davis Cup between Chile and Russia at the beginning of February 2007.
Read more about this topic: La Serena Song Festival
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“It is usual for a Man who loves Country Sports to preserve the Game in his own Grounds, and divert himself upon those that belong to his Neighbour.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“In the past, it seemed to make sense for a sportswriter on sabbatical from the playpen to attend the quadrennial hawgkilling when Presidential candidates are chosen, to observe and report upon politicians at play. After all, national conventions are games of a sort, and sports offers few spectacles richer in low comedy.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)