Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca made soccer history last month during the tournament opener between Mexico and South Africa, becoming the first stadium in history to host three FIFA World Cup opening matches, having staged World Cup openers in 1970 and 1986, and now in 2026. Now, Google is marking that milestone with a new way to experience the iconic venue from anywhere on the planet.
A digital canvas built from six decades of archives
Through a collaboration between Google Earth and Fundación ICA, fans and enthusiasts can now delve into the stadium’s illustrious past through an interactive digital platform. The experience allows users to see Estadio Azteca up close through an interactive digital canvas and imagery dating to the 1960s.
The experience, titled “El Legado del Estadio Azteca,” includes sections with historical information and photographs from the stadium’s construction all the way through March 2026, when the stadium reopened ahead of the World Cup.
The tour is organized into nine chapters navigated using arrows on the left side of the screen. A right-hand panel lets users explore photographs from the ICA Foundation Historical Archive dating back to the 1960s.
This kind of browser-based, no-install approach echoes the platform strategy Google has refined across several of its mapping and Earth products, including its recent 3D emoji rebuild and other interactive tools.
Engineering feat and historic milestones
The tour details the origins of the project: in the late 1950s, Guillermo Cañedo, then president of the Mexican Football Federation, commissioned architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca to design the venue.
The construction site at Santa Úrsula Coapa was covered in basaltic rock from the El Xitle volcano. Preparing it required dynamiting approximately 63,000 square meters of terrain and extracting 180,000 tonnes of rock.
The stadium broke ground in 1961, and the inaugural match was held on May 29, 1966, with a capacity of 107,494 spectators.
The tour also highlights watershed sporting moments. In 1971, Azteca hosted an unofficial women’s world championship; the final between Denmark and Mexico drew approximately 110,000 spectators, the highest attendance ever recorded at a women’s sporting event at that time.
From its origins in 1961 to the clashes that crowned legends like Pelé and Maradona, the stadium has been home to six decades of sporting history.
Renovations for 2026 and the third World Cup
Upgrades for the 2026 tournament included a hybrid GrassMaster pitch, new video screens, LED lighting, a refurbished facade and new locker rooms, while preserving the original concrete architecture.
Those changes set the stage for Azteca’s unprecedented third World Cup chapter, cementing its place as the first stadium to host matches in three different FIFA World Cups, as well as the first to host three opening matches.
How to access the experience
The project brings together documents, images and accounts covering the architectural, sporting and cultural evolution of one of Mexico’s most emblematic stadiums.
Through the experience, Google Earth and ICA convert the stadium’s historical archive into a digital tool that allows users to trace its evolution and preserve part of the memory of soccer in Mexico.
The effort reflects Google’s broader push to layer cultural and historical context onto its mapping platforms, a direction also visible in its Waterloo Futures Lab prototyping program, which has explored similar interactive storytelling applications.
The experience is available directly in Google Earth, with no application download required, organized into nine navigable chapters. Users can access the tour through any modern web browser.
The full interactive experience is accessible via Google’s official Earth blog, where the company announced the collaboration with Fundación ICA.
