Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata
Argentine sports club based in the city of La Plata

Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkluβ ðe ximˈnasjaj esˈɣɾima la ˈplata]; La Plata Gymnastics and Fencing Club), also known simply as Gimnasia, is an Argentine professional sports club based in the city of La Plata, Buenos Aires Province. Founded in 1887 as "Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima", the club is mostly known for its football team, which currently plays in Primera División, the first division of the Argentine football league system. The club was most famously managed by footballing legend Diego Maradona, from September 2019 until his death in November 2020.
Apart from football, CGE also hosts a large number of sports such as athletics, basketball, boxing, chess, fencing, futsal, artistic gymnastics, field hockey, martial arts (aikido, karate, kendo, taekwondo), swimming, roller skating, tennis, volleyball, and weightlifting.
History
The "Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata" was founded on 3 June 1887 as a civil association, and thus is the oldest surviving football club still participating in the Argentine league. The club also claims to be the oldest football club in the Americas, despite other football clubs, such as Peruvian Lima Cricket F.C., having older foundation dates. Its foundation came barely five years after the creation of the City of La Plata in 1882.
The first sports offered to its members were, as its Spanish name indicates, gymnastics and fencing. Clubs supporting these sports were common among the upper classes at the end of the 19th century (cf. the prior foundation of Gimnasia y Esgrima de Buenos Aires in 1880).
“Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata” enters the record as argentine sports club based in the city of La Plata. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Club, Gimnasia and Esgrima can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Club, Gimnasia and Esgrima provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18640. VIAF identifies the subject as 305361972. The Library of Congress control number is n2013064304. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 2019, 2020 and 1882.
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This entry incorporates text from “Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.