Most golfers picture the game’s history in Scotland: windswept links, grey skies and stone clubhouses. Yet one of the oldest chapters of golf outside Britain was written much further south, on the sunny Atlantic coast of Portugal. In 1890, a small group of British merchants who made their living from port wine decided they could not live without their favourite game. So they built a course of their own beside the sea. Welcome to another chapter of our “Golf Origins” series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the late 19th century, Porto had been home to British wine families for generations. They shipped port from the lodges on the Douro to Britain, and they brought their own customs and sports with them. Golf was one of them. According to Oporto Golf Club’s own history<\/a>, the club began in 1890, when a group of British players linked to the port wine trade created an improvised nine-hole course. National Club Golfer<\/a> et The Yeatman<\/a>, a hotel owned by one of Porto’s historic port wine houses, tell the same story: the club was founded by the British port community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They chose a stretch of sandy coast at Espinho, just south of Porto. As Top 100 Golf Courses<\/a> describes, the first holes were laid out between the railway line and the beach. Clubhouse Algarve<\/a> adds that the site was easy to reach by train, which made it perfect for merchants escaping the city for an afternoon on the links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first course was far from the manicured fairways we know today. The club’s history describes it as mostly sand and grass, with nine holes and a par of 43. It was called “St. Skeff Links” in honour of the club’s first president, Charles Neville Skeffington. In those early days, the club was known as the Oporto Niblicks, a name that nods to the niblick, an old lofted iron club, as both Top 100 Golf Courses<\/a> et Clubhouse Algarve<\/a> record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 1900, the members built a new nine-hole links a little further south, together with their first clubhouse, and the club took the name it still carries: Oporto Golf Club. Sources differ slightly on the exact year, with some giving 1901, but the club itself dates the change to 1900. The full 18-hole links, with a par of 73, finally opened in 1934. If you have ever wondered why that number matters so much, we explained it in why golf has 18 holes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oporto Golf Club is the oldest golf club in Portugal and, as Golf Monthly<\/a> notes, the oldest on the whole Iberian Peninsula. Spain’s oldest club, the Real Club de Golf de Las Palmas<\/a>, was founded a year later, in 1891, and it sits out in the Atlantic on Gran Canaria, not on the peninsula itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across continental Europe, only a handful of clubs are older. Top 100 Golf Courses<\/a> lists Pau, Dinard and Biarritz in France, and Royal Antwerp in Belgium, which makes Oporto the fifth oldest club on the continent. Pau, founded in 1856, is the pioneer: Scottish Golf History<\/a> calls it the oldest surviving golf course outside Scotland. Like Oporto, it was created by British residents who missed their game. Golf has older roots on the continent too, as we saw in our story of the French game of jeu de mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSt. Skeff Links: A Humble First Course<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Oldest Golf Club in the Iberian Peninsula<\/h2>\n\n\n\n