After the end of the Surfcamp in Esmoriz (if you haven’t read about it yet you can do it here) we moved a bit further down the coast of Portugal to the little coastal town of Figueira da Foz.
We had planned to visit Nazaré (any surfer worth his salt wouldn‘t miss it) and with the incoming hurricane swell „Erin“ on Tuesday (which is extremely rare for Summer) we now had a realistic chance of seeing the big waves Nazare is famous for worldwide. Maybe we would even see some guys doing tow-in surfing (since the bigger waves move to fast to paddle in, jet skis are used to pull them into the waves). And boy, we weren‘t disappointed.
When we arrived in Nazare around 10:00 am the small fishing village was already full of cars frantically trying to find a parking spot. We managed to find one (in the shade even) but an hour later, we wouldn‘t have been so lucky. We walked the mile up to the lighthouse on top of the cliff, and were greeted by droves of spectators and crashing waves on the bottom of the cliff. There are many properties that make Nazaré such a special big wave spot (there are tons of articles online) but one that we really appreciated was, that it breaks so close to shore. In other breaks like Jaws, that break far away from the coast, there is no chance to watch the show. But in Nazaré you are super close to the action.
After watching the surfers for a while we also visited the little museum. It explains the mechanics of why Nazaré has such big waves and also shows a small exhibition of surf boards of big wave surfers such as Garrett McNamara and the current Guinness World Record holder Sebastian Steudtner (a German!) for the biggest wave surfed, a 86 ft giant wave from fall 2020. On Tuesday, the waves were „only“ in the 20-25ft range. But still very impressive
For lunch we had delicious tapas and then we took the furnicular down to the Nazare beach. The little town was full of tourists (a bit more than usual for summer, the big waves had drawn even more crowds) but we still enjoyed walking along the beach and eating some ice cream. Since we needed some more wax for the next surf sessions we quickly stopped by a little surf shop in the middle of the town- and ran into Ela and Jean-Luc who we met at the Surfcamp last week! What a „coincidence“ 🙂
When we were going back up again to the car (we hadn‘t moved it since morning as we would not have been able to find a spot again) we noticed that we had left my sweater in the surf shop at the beach. No problem, just drive down and pick it up. Wrong. The main road down to Nazaré was blocked (too many cars down there already) so we had to find another way down. Thankfully we found one and after this last detour we got back on the road to our apartment in Figueira da Foz.
