They began to play cricket matches against each other to pass the time, undergo leisure initiatives, and feel more at home, and inevitably, they founded Oporto Cricket Club in 1855, and it soon become the center of the social life of the Porto British colony.
[2] Its grounds were situated south of the River Douro, at Candal in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal's second-largest city, and from where the Port wine was exported until 1896.
During the first years of cricket in Portugal, there was a healthy rivalry between the Porto club and the ex-pats in Lisbon.
[2] In October 1893, the president of the recently established Futebol Clube do Porto, António Nicolau de Almeida, made an attempt to launch the club with an invitation to Guilherme Pinto Basto, the president of Club Lisbonense, to a football game in Porto, but Pinto Basto declined and instead made the same invitation to Hugh Ponsonby, the then secretary of the Oporto Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club, who accepted it because, at the time, they already had a section dedicated to football due to its rapid growth in England, the homeland of the company's workers.
In addition to cricket, tennis, and football, the Oporto club also hosts other modalities such as squash, billiards, snooker, with pool being opened in the summer months between April and September.