Kitchener

Community Organizations: Portuguese Club of Kitchener

KITCHENER’S POPULATION – 575,847

STATISTICS FOR THE PORTUGUESE IN KITCHENER:

AS MOTHER
TONGUE		AS MOST
SPOKEN		KNOWLEDGE OF
THE LANGUAGE		BORN IN
PORTUGAL		ETHNIC
ORIGIN
9,350
1.6% of population		3,940
0.7% of population		11,470
2% of population		6,800
1.2% of population		19,890
3.4% of population

Audio Version:

Kitchener was founded in 1816 as Berlin in honour of the origin of its earliest European residents. In 1912, it was elevated to City and proclaimed the German Capital of Canada. However, the start of WWI created pressure to change the city’s name. It took on the current name to honour Lord Kitchener, then Canada’s Secretary of State for War. The city is now home to a significant Portuguese presence of which the Portuguese Club is the most renowned.

According to the 2016 Census, there are 9,350 residents of Kitchener-Waterloo who consider Portuguese their mother tongue, a whopping 3,940 who speak it most often at home and 11,470 who can communicate in the language. In total, there are 6,800 people here who were born in Portugal and 19,890 who consider Portuguese their ethnic origin.

Dowtown Kitchener (photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Kitchener,_Ontario_2.jpg)

The community began to organize in 1960 when it formed a soccer team that came to be known as the Lions of Kitchener since it wore the colours of the famed Sporting Club de Portugal. This led to the founding of the Portuguese Club, in 1969. It currently stands on a gigantic plot of land, on the edge of town, purchased on the same year the organization was founded.

Around town, even though there is a large Portuguese community in the city, there are few indicators of our presence here in comparison to other localities with similar Portuguese-Canadian population sizes.

With files from Luso-Ontario Magazine, 2008
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