Parco dello Sport Al Maglio officially opens in Lugano

On 19 September 2026, the Parco dello Sport Al Maglio was officially inaugurated in Canobbio, marking the completion of a key component of Lugano’s wider sports and events district.

The opening ceremony, organised by the City of Lugano and the Municipality of Canobbio, brought together local and cantonal authorities, sports associations and citizens to celebrate a new place conceived not simply as a sports facility, but as a large public landscape open to the entire community.

For LAND Suisse, the project represents a concrete example of how sports infrastructure can become part of a broader urban and ecological system.

Sport within a living landscape

Extending across approximately 100,000 m², the project develops the concept of an integrated “Parco dello Sport”, where football pitches, buildings and technical infrastructure are embedded within a continuous green landscape.

Four football pitches – three with artificial turf and one with natural grass – are combined with a multifunctional building and a network of paths, open spaces and recreational areas. The centre is already used by several local youth and women’s teams, while its wider landscape is designed to remain accessible to citizens beyond organised sporting activities.

Rather than treating landscape as the space left over around the sports facilities, the project reverses this relationship: the playing fields and buildings sit within a large natural meadow structured by trees, paths, embankments and ecological elements.

Reconnecting the Cassarate landscape

The Parco dello Sport Al Maglio is also an important piece of the wider Raggio Verde del Cassarate, LAND’s long-term vision for strengthening environmental, landscape and social connections along the river corridor.

Pedestrian and cycling routes link the park to the Cassarate, the surrounding woodland, Canobbio and the wider slow-mobility network, reinforcing the role of the site as a connector rather than an isolated sports complex.

The landscape strategy also places particular attention on biodiversity and water. The Maglio stream, previously channelled underground, has been brought back to the surface south of the main football pitch, while a new wetland biotope contributes to creating habitat for local species.

“The ambition was to create much more than a sports centre: a landscape where sport, everyday life and Nature can coexist, and where infrastructure becomes part of a wider ecological and public-space network.”

A new green destination for Lugano

The opening of Al Maglio transforms a previously peripheral area into a new destination for sport, leisure and everyday life, strengthening its relationship with the river landscape and the surrounding territory.

For LAND Suisse, the project reflects an approach that has guided its work in Switzerland over the past decade: using landscape as the connective structure between mobility, ecology, public space and urban development.

With the Parco dello Sport now fully operational, Lugano gains not only new sporting facilities, but a new piece of green infrastructure – a place for training and competition, but also for walking, meeting, playing and spending time outdoors.

A sports centre, a park and a new link within the landscape of the Cassarate: Al Maglio shows how infrastructure can become an opportunity to reconnect people with Nature.