Surfing Portugal

I have just come back from Portugal. It has been such an amazing trip… Although my parents run a restaurant/motel on Jaén in the seventies and they travelled extensively with me throughout Andalusia I was really looking forward to get back to those southern landscapes. Malén and I setup the route Madrid, Seville, Puerto de Santa María, Cadiz, finishing the first part of the trip checking out the hippish town of Caños de Meca and enjoying its chill out scene for a couple of nights.

We started surfing down there at El Palmar meeting true free spirits such as Moja (he has his little surf shop down the road from the camping site), who fixed my keel and gave us some good surfing advice. All the way towards Cabo San Roque, the farthest West European peace of land, we found great spots on the shouthern Algarve cost such as Meia Praia and, specially, Zaival. There we enjoyed beautiful small to medium swells with perfect wind conditions (gotta love North wind down there).

From Cabo to North Portugal it was the other way round; extremely consistent swells but very exposed and easily blown out. Still we loved Cordama and Castalejo, both with impressive cliffs. South Carrapateira (Praia do Amando) was the last wind protected spot we found and it was a very fun ride. North Carrapateira (Bordeira) was amazing but too big for newbie riders.

This trip has helped me a lot, mainly to get down this train of pseudo-social craziness. Something –definitively not my plans- kept me away from facebook, mail, twitter and iPad all these days. Only the iPhone Stormrider Guide was used occasionally to check out spots, and that was not even as much as the paper version. One of the most beautiful sentences I have read in years (@aaraguz at http://aaraguz.posterous.com after her summer brake) came over and over to my mind: “I have the feeling that everything got frozen, and that the same tweets kept up flowing as the water in these tacky Zen fountains throughout a close-circuit”.

Don’t get me wrong. I definitively think connectivity and connectivism are the new paradigms. I truly think that we are walking towards a better and more authentic society due, among many more things, to this kind of “sensitivity swell” that we, as a society, are experiencing -more on that on next posts-. But still, please… Stop mithiphying each new tool that comes out and just take it for what it is: a tool. If after finishing this article you are still going back to tweet, please be responsible. Share only what you truly think that it’s worth to be share.