IT’S already after sunset when we push out from the slipway with the low evening tide. We pass almost silently under the Somo-Pedreña road bridge and out through the mouth of the Miera River, just in time to see the streetlamps of Santander come on across the bay. I’d be more entranced by the city’s glowing reflection if I wasn’t trying to keep my balance on a stand-up paddleboard (SUP), against a quickening wind that makes the surface pretty choppy.
A passing ferry creates a wake I have to brace for, bending knees to absorb the pulse that lifts the board beneath me. The trick is to look straight ahead, says my guide Saul Viadero. “If you look down at the water, that’s where you’ll go.” But he wants me to look around too, “to enjoy the marine environment”, which is to Saul the point and pleasure of SUP. Behind us rise the twilight peaks of Cantabria’s coastal mountains. Beside us, seabirds roost in the treetops of the Royal Pedreña Golf Club, where local hero and world champ Seve Ballesteros learned to play and later designed his own course (Santander Airport is also named after him).
To the other side, around the estuarial bend, is Somo Beach, where Saul himself first learned to ride the smooth, steep, near-sculptural waves that barrel in from the Bay of Biscay. Many years later he’s a veteran instructor there at the country’s best-known academy, the Escuela Cántabra de Surf, though SUP has since become his core passion.
“I much prefer paddling to surfing,” he says of that offshoot sport. “It’s such a different way to be in the water, and it lets you disconnect from everything else.” The SUP experience can be quite peaceful in this respect, but Saul also goes in for serious feats of endurance. The Spanish SUP championship is held in these waters, and to compete means paddling for 24 hours straight, passing his hometown, Noja, and other beaches known for big waves, like El Ris and El Brusco.
Saul has placed second and third in that event. In his own field he too is a local sporting hero. And while he claims to be the school’s worst surfing teacher, he’s just the guy you want leading a SUP excursion. A strapping fellow, built like a logger, he’s a steadying presence with a gentle, Zenlike manner of correcting your stance on the board and grip on the paddle.
“My students cannot fall,” says Saul. He might mean they are not allowed to, or that under his guidance they simply don’t. For my part I have done this before, though only on glassier rivers. Lately I’ve been feeling certain aches of middle-age, and my right foot is sore with persistent plantar fasciitis. I shift it a little to find a more comfortable position, and the whole board tips up and out from under me. A tiny adjustment, a spectacular error. I’m almost upside-down in the air so that the back of my head hits the water first, and I drop like an anchor into Santander Bay.
It’s very cold, sure, but maybe not as bad as you’d expect, or at least not when you’re wearing neoprene booties and a 5/4mm wetsuit. At the time of my dunking it’s close to midwinter, which is low season here on Spain’s Atlantic coast. The summer crowds have long since cleared out and the locals hunker down as heavy winds and rains roll over the seascape. But there are many bright, clear spells too, and the waves tend to be sturdiest from October to April.
Indeed, the next morning brings optimal conditions to Somo Beach: blue skies, mild breezes, and powerful swells perfect for surfing. One street back from that long stretch of honey-coloured sand is the Escuela Cántabra de Surf, where Nacho García tells me they get about 320 “surfable days” a year in this spot. Part of Nacho’s mission is to make people understand that the colder, quieter months can be the best time to come. “Look, you have the beach to yourself.”
The school he founded here with his older brother David “Capi” García in 1991 was the first of its kind in this country. Born in Santander, they spent their youth as “beach rats” at Somo. Their own parents taught them to surf here, having been among the first generation to ride plankis in Cantabria alongside fellows like Jesús Fiochi – the pioneer credited with bringing the first modern fibreglass board to this coast from Biarritz in the 1960s.
Now, after what Nacho calls “35 seasons of hard work”, their school is also a gear rental shop, a surfwear boutique, and a reception area for the hostel and cabins where they accommodate guests for weekend breaks and summer training camps. The village around it has steadily transformed into a Spanish equivalent of big wave communities on Maui or Bali, clustered with cafes, pubs and burger joints that bear the word “surfer” on their signs.
“We’re proud to have put Somo on the map for a lot of people,” says Nacho. The surrounding region, known as Ribamontán al Mar, was designated Spain’s first surf reserve in 2012, a largely symbolic title that might yet ward off the kind of development – building, dredging, and so on – that has ruined other surf breaks from the Canaries to Mexico. “The local economy has grown with these waves, this natural resource that is infinite, in theory. But we have to protect it.”
The family business, meanwhile, has broadened out from surfing to SUP, which Nacho calls “another angle of attack”, expanding their domain into the rivermouth and other, calmer waters. If the sea is flat enough, you can also paddle out to the islands of Santa Marina (a former colony for monks, now deserted) or Mouro, where a cave system forms a navigable tunnel right through to the far side. But when the sea is high, some experts now combine the disciplines to SUP-surf on modified boards, using the paddle as a manual rudder and power-steering tool.
This is something close to what the early Hawaiians used to do: the very origins of surfing as we know it. As far as we are from the South Pacific, it’s a fitting sport for natives of these shores, who have mastered the waves in many ways over the centuries. Across the water in Santander – a short ride on a small ferry that looks more like a tugboat – I visit the portside Cantabrian Maritime Museum, which traces that nautical history from paleolithic shellfishing to Renaissance voyages of exploration to ongoing expertise in modern shipbuilding.
Just behind the waterfront I stop for cask-drafted house vermouth and a plate of gildas (salty, tangy skewers of olive, anchovy and pickled green Ibarra chilli pepper) at Vermutería Solórzano, a beautifully tiled and red-painted bar from 1941. A couple of blocks away is Bodega Cigaleña, another landmark brocaded in ornate glass, iron and woodwork. The food and wine are real winter warmers: hake with clams, monkfish with kimchi, a heavy-duty wild boar stew with a bottle of good Cantabrian garnacha. For a digestif I take a shot of orujo, the clear pomace brandy that fortifies fishermen in these parts. It’s strong enough to strip the rust off a wreck.
You can surf off Santander too, at the city beach El Sardinero, but the waves are better at Somo. Or, so I’m told by Monica Gomez, who has crossed the bay almost every day this week to catch them. Santander-born and raised, she took lessons as a teenager, then moved away and fell out of practice. Back in town for a while, she’s been picking up where she left off.
“I thought I’d forget,” says Monica, “but it’s coming back. When you take a wave that hasn’t broken yet, and touch that wall of water, there’s so much adrenaline you want to scream like a kid.” This is just what I want to hear as I head out for my own lesson. I surfed a little in my backpacking youth, and I’d love to think it’s not too late, though instructor Alvaro Herrera warns that advancing years (and increasing bodyweight) can really work against you in this sport.
Even with Alvaro holding my board steady, pushing it onto the breakers, and telling me when to pop up, I move like a potato on a butterknife. On top of my physical liabilities, I’m naturally resistant to claims made for surfing as a spiritual exercise too. But it’s also true that one good wave is enough to give you hope, or even faith. I call you all to witness as this ageing landlubber with a sore foot wobbles upright for a few seconds that feel like light years: rising, standing, walking on water.
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