Iniciativa Porteña against Sagunto stadium: open meeting on 4 November
Iniciativa Porteña invites residents to Puerto de Sagunto on 4 November to debate the cost of the new stadium. The project, budgeted at 16.14 million euros with VAT, would rise in Internúcleos.
Iniciativa Porteña, the local party led by Eduardo Márquez, has called a public hearing for Wednesday 4 November 2026 at 19:00 in the Centro Cívico of Puerto de Sagunto (the coastal district). The event is open to any resident and will let the group explain why it rejects the football stadium that Sagunto City Council plans for the Internúcleos area, and which works it would put first.
According to the technical report the council presented in April, the ground would hold about 5,000 spectators and cost 16.14 million euros including VAT. Spread across the roughly 70,000 inhabitants of the municipality, that amounts to about 230 euros per person. Iniciativa Porteña warns that rising construction costs could push the bill above 20 million, more than 3.8 million over the budget. That is the party's own estimate, not a revised municipal budget.
Another figure is in circulation. On 14 April 2026, valencianews.es reported that the same report put the total cost at 13.5 million euros including VAT, and added that drafting the project would cost about 522,000 euros and site management another 410,000. Neither source explains the gap with the 16.14 million, so each amount should be read as attributed to its outlet and not as a single budget.
Márquez argues that Puerto de Sagunto still lacks sports facilities, mobility options, infrastructure and public services, and that putting an investment that could exceed 20 million into a new ground does not fit that reality. He says his group is not against investing in sport, but against spending that, in his view, is not proportionate and does not reach as many residents as possible.
At the meeting, the party will present the features of the project and set its cost against other works it considers necessary: improvements to existing sports facilities, new municipal infrastructure, mobility measures and upgrades to public spaces. The sources consulted give no specific amounts for those alternatives.
The stadium would be designed mainly for Atlético Saguntino, a club founded on 1 July 1951 at the Café Español. It currently plays at the Nou Camp de Morvedre, which holds 4,000 spectators, about 1,000 fewer than the planned ground. In the 2025-26 season it competed in Tercera Federación, group 6, the fifth tier of Spanish football; earlier it had spent time in Segunda División B after winning the 2015-16 Tercera División.
The matter already reached the municipal plenary session in June. The council agreed to make construction conditional on available funding and on an economic plan that guarantees viability. The project is planned in phases: the first would be paid with municipal funds and the following ones would depend on outside grants, so only that first stage comes directly out of the council's budget.
Despite those conditions, Iniciativa Porteña maintains its opposition and asks residents to attend on Wednesday to hear its proposals and discuss where municipal investment should go. El Periódico de Aquí has not reported a response from the governing team to this call so far.
According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional data from Wikipedia and valencianews.es.