EMBRACING COLOSSUS
Since 2011, Praia do Norte has drawn thousands of visitors to witness Portugal’s newly-famous big-wave break.
The view from Sitio, looking down on Nazaré’s beachside promenade and more tranquil surf zone. On big winter swells, though, water will cross the sand and pour into the streets.
JUST offshore of Nazaré’s bustling beachside promenade of bars, souvenir shops and restaurants, there swirls a feared patch of ocean known to locals as the Widow’s Rip. In the years before the town’s harbor was built, fishermen used oxen to pull their brightly colored boats across the beach before rowing bravely into the surf. When seas were rough, as they almost always are in the winter, the small vessels would sometimes flip in the angry shorebreak. Any fisherman tossed from their boat would inevitably be carried out to sea by the Widow’s Rip, where they would sometimes drown in full view of their horrified wives. If you visit Nazaré today, you’ll see dozens of old women shuffling through the streets and along the beach, wearing black frocks in mourning for husbands lost at sea.
“When I was little, everybody always said, ‘Don’t go in the water over there or you will die,’” local bodyboarder Dino Casimiro told me last April as we shared beers at a small restaurant above Nazaré’s golden-sand beach. “Over there” meant Praia do Norte, a windswept crescent of sand on the other side of a towering rocky headland that separates the wild, raw North Atlantic from the more protected seas to the south.
“But ever since I was able to leave the house as a child,” Casimiro said, “I would walk to the cliff to look at the big waves. I always hoped that one day someone would surf them.”
That just about sums up the small town of Nazaré’s complicated relationship with the ocean. The centuries-old fishing community has always depended on the sea while at the same time greatly fearing and respecting its tremendous power. Nazaré sits about as far west into the Atlantic as you can get while still being part of the European continent. It’s positioned to absorb the brunt of any North Atlantic swells, and the massive Nazaré Canyon just offshore funnels, strengthens and shapes the enormous waves that unload on Praia do Norte’s shifting sandbars.
Until 2011, if you’d heard of Nazaré at all, it was probably because you’re a big fan of religious tourism and knew that the town’s imposing church, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, features a celebrated black Madonna statue, which has been in Nazaré since the eighth century. Or perhaps you’d taken a day trip up from the far more renowned surf destination of Peniche, some 25 miles
