Surfing with Gaudi

Acknowledgements 

I want to thank Professor Baden Offord from the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University for making this trip to Barcelona a possibility. It was a life changing opportunity and I’m really grateful for it. I'd also like to thank Sue Ballyn who is the Co-Director of the centre of Australian Studies at Barcelona University for taking the time to share your knowledge of the city and loaning me some really interesting and useful resources. Thanks to Kim Satchel for your patience with me and for steering me in the right direction. Thanks to the all of the other students for hanging out and being such great company and finally thanks to all of the Catalan locals who were so cool, welcoming and helpful and who made my trip to Barcelona such a joy.

“At its most basic, surfing is the act of riding a wave. In its enactment, it is glide, power, drive, flow and connection with the wave and the energy of that wave. It is a deeply personal experience which thousands of people take part in every day, at many levels and in many different ways. The experience of riding the energy of a wave is one that is difficult to explain. Surfing remains an enigmatic and mysterious activity and many surfers remain deeply affected by surfing throughout their lives (Olive. 2006).”

  Today, given that the earth has not only been completely mapped, but photographed in its entirety, for many in this modern world, stepping into the sea satiates the desire to venture out into the unknown, out past the oceanic frontier. The sea offers a sense of exhilaration; it can offer freedom from an otherwise banal, safe and conventional reality. Surfing provides the opportunity to escape such normality and replace it with raw nature, replace it with thick brine, replace it with the beautiful but uncontrollable sea. Swells moving in from the curvature of the horizon continue to lure anticipative surfers out to their fluid, uncultured space; its an emotional place that shifts between finding ease with solitude and negotiating hordes of people and the human drama associated with it. It is a place full of chance, risk and opportunity, where no two waves are the same and each ride offers new challenges for the surfer to charter through. The endless pursuit for uncrowded perfection, the search for clean, empty waves, waves that offer the pure thrill of returning shoreward immersed in the erupting final moments of a breaking swell is what captivates the imagination and commands the full commitment of all surfing devotees. Continually washing them ashore, the waves deliver surfers back over the nature/culture threshold, back from the anarchic to the controlled, back from the naked to the clothed. I like to think that the joyful allure of a breaking wave is the only thing preventing surfers from paddling off the mapped world entirely, returning them one by one to the safety of a cultivated civilisation, returning them to amble up the beach, exhausted, drunk on enjoyment and already planning their next escape.

I feel it is important to acknowledge that surfing is nothing more and nothing less than the multisensory experience of simply riding a wave. All that is required to participate in the surfing endeavour is a waves energy moving through water that is powerful enough to support the forward momentum of a planing human form whilst either bodysurfing, or laying, sitting, kneeling or standing upon a buoyant vessel on which the water’s surface can be traversed. Differing people surf for different reasons as surfing can satisfy a multitude of ever-changing desires. For some, surfing competitively is a job; it’s a sport and a means to make money, whilst for others surfing might be an artistic freedom of expression, the board as the brush, and the wave as the canvas. It can of course be both. Surfing can quench a longing for solitude or it can be a fun social event shared with friends and family. At it’s heart however, Hawaiian surfer Gerry Lopez puts it, saying that “surfing teaches you to be in the moment, to go with the flow smoothly. That’s how you get the most of the wave and it’s also how you get the most out of life (Rollins, 2012).”

Today, embodiments of surfing can take many forms and can happen in the most unlikely of places, from artificial wave-pools in the deserts of Dubai to stationary wave surfing in the Isar river of Munich. The traditional style of surfing however requires a large enough body of water for wind energy to be transferred into wave energy, the larger the water’s surface area and the more exposure to storms or strong winds, the more likelihood there will be for waves to be generated that are powerful enough to ride. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that surfing’s origins stem from the Pacific Islands given that they sit in the middle of the largest ocean on earth. Nowadays, mainly thanks to globalisation and the commercialisation of surfing, the sport’s popularity has grown from being what was once a locally practiced indigenous spiritual-cum-athletic pursuit to spreading globally into a widely practiced cultural phenomenon. Starting with the Pacific facing coastlines of America and Australia, surf culture has gradually spread, reaching practically every ocean facing country on earth. More recently, surfing subcultures have even began to appear in the lesser exposed coastal regions, places that receive smaller and less-frequent surf-able waves. Places like the Great Lakes of North America, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea are a few examples of areas that were once presumed to be unsurfable due to their lack of consistent swell but have nevertheless developed thriving surfing subcultures. Each surf spot always adopts it’s own cultural uniqueness determined largely by the collective identity of ‘the locals,’ but one thing these non-oceanic seaside communities do share is a group of surfers so enthusiastic that they’re willing to patiently await their intermittent and localised wind swells in order to be rewarded with the stoke of sliding shoreward on a moving pulse of wave energy. The Catalan city of Barcelona is one such place and it is where I was fortunate enough to be flown by Southern Cross University to perform an independent research project to examine their rapidly growing surfing culture.

“Cultural studies chooses to go to the margins of society for its scholarly practice primarily in order to demonstrate the larger significance of those margins and to consider those who are otherwise unacknowledged… it is a demarginalization in the name of appreciating the value of social and cultural difference in modern complex social systems.” (Schwoch & White, 2006: 14)

In the most literal sense of the word, surfing is intrinsically a marginalised activity. The practise itself takes place on the very fringes of society, out beyond the topographical periphery, beyond the high-tide line and in a space governed more by shifting natural cycles than cultural doctrines and societal impositions. The surfing space is however not entirely out of cultures reach; rather it has been framed as “a place where nature meets culture; as a liminal space that is neither merely nature nor culture but somewhere in between (Fiske, 1989).”

  Prior to surfing’s early beginnings, a rough sea was considered to be out of cultures reach. The big surf was off-limits and never seen as a safe place for the land-dwelling, hominids. For millennia, the ocean was deemed a dangerous and unpredictable place, an untameable void that was rich in folklore about adversities at sea and mythologies involving monsters of the deep and the like.

There are a few varied opinions of where surfing was first practiced, but Ford and Brown side with the most commonly accepted view that its origins lie with either the pre-modern Pacific Island peoples of Hawaii or perhaps in the Marquesas (Ford & Brown, 2006). They reflect on surfing’s origins as the paradisal beginnings in a cultural context of a ritual pantheistic, as a spiritual harmony with nature (Ford & Brown, 2006).” This is the deeply nostalgic interpretation of surfing’s early culture, which is believed to have lasted for most of the last millennium until the arrival of British explorer Captain James Cook in the Waimea River in January of 1778. Upon his first observations of a surfer, Cook wrote in his daily log, “I could not help concluding, that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven so fast and so smoothly by the sea. (Warshaw. 2003)” Impressed as he evidently was, surfing was nevertheless shunned by colonial ideals of social order with early missionaries in Hawaii said to have strongly discouraged all indigenous athletic customs such as surfboard riding, ocean swimming, wrestling, dancing etc. (Marcus. 2002) “ This was largely because, during that time, “the concept of culture as an abstraction and an absolute emerged as a recognition of the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the rest of society and as an attempt to create ultimate values at which to aim and by which to judge other social and economic activities (Billington. 1991).” Surfing did simply not comply with what was then considered a moral or intellectual activity. Thus by 1838, a visitor to Hawaii had unsurprisingly noted that activities such as surfing were in opposition to the strict tents of Calvinism and were therefore being supressed. Believed to be against the laws of God, it was acknowledged that evangelists were “impressing upon the minds of the chiefs and others, the idea that all who practice such activities secure the displeasure of offending heaven (Marcus. 2002).” The missionaries were so successful in their oppression of native traditions that by the turn of the 20th century, surfing in Hawaii had almost disappeared entirely with nothing but rumours remaining of surfers out in the remote corners of the islands.  Fascinatingly however, when surfing was almost wiped of the map completely, it was at this time that the surfing renaissance began. Somewhat ironically, it was three white men who began championing the reintroduction of surfing to Hawaiian culture; their names were George Freeth, Alexander Hume Ford and Jack London (Marcus. 2002). During the first decade of the 1900’s London wrote beautifully of his firsthand surfing experiences, whilst Freeth was performing some of the earliest public surfing presentations and Ford was working tirelessly to develop the world’s first surfing club. When he eventually succeeded The Hui Nalu in Waikiki was formed. A key member of this club, Duke Kahanamoku, who was famed for his surfing prowess and world-record holding swimming achievements, travelled to California in 1912 and then Sydney in 1915 where he performed the first international Hawaiian style surfing demonstrations. In Australia he attracted a crowd in the thousands to Freshwater Beach and put on such an inspiring display of riding upright on the waves that today he’s celebrated as the father of modern surfing for introducing the sport to the world (Warshaw, 2002). Just shy of one century on from upright surfing’s addition to Australia’s history, the sport has developed numerous subcultures and its popularity has grown exponentially.  According to the Sweeney Report, there are now two and a half million surfers in Australia, approximately ten per cent of the country’s population. Surfing has become an iconic Australian sport that gets practiced freely and plays a huge part in Australian culture and the Australian identity (Stark. 2010).  This wasn’t always the case however. In fact, for the first half of the nineteenth century, Australian beach going was governed by the same Victorian code as in England. This included curfews for sea bathing (in general, no swimming between 7A.M. and 6P.M.), area restrictions, (no swimming in waters exposed to view from any wharf, street, public place or dwelling house), dress codes (neck-to-knee bathing costumes for both men and women), and gender segregation, with all relevant bylaws to be enforced by city-employed nuisance inspectors (Warshaw. 2011). During this period it is perhaps unsurprising that the pioneers of bodysurfing in Australia had developed a rebellious disregard for authority and following Duke’s introduction of the surfboard they transmitted their roguish spirit so that “Australian surfing began as an activity that defied rather then defined the austere cultural mindset of the early 1900’s (Miller. 2011)”. This meant that surfers who weren’t participating in Surf Life Saving affairs were met with similar scrutiny to that of the Indigenous Hawaiians for prioritising favourable surfing conditions over their “more serious” responsibilities. The city beaches, where surfers wanted to surf, were unbearable for the surfers as they felt stuck between the structured nature of the Surf Life Saving clubs and the laws of local councils. Surfers were compelled to remain members of Surf Life Saving clubs due to the needs of storing their solid and heavy fifteen to eighteen foot surfboards at the clubhouses (Miller. 2011).

Up until the late 1960’s surfing continued to be affiliated with the counter cultural movements of Australia. Dress codes began to be directly challenged, after World War II when the two-piece bikini became popular. This was despite the strict policing of specific swimwear dimensions dictated by local government authority. Another restriction at the beaches for the surfers of the day was a compulsory registration of one’s surfboard, which, to the inspector’s discretion, could be confiscated at any time if not used correctly (Young, 1983). It was 1969 that saw the humble beginnings of two of the now three behemoth Australian surf companies being established along Victoria’s coastline. By the time the ’70s arrived, most of the now-incomprehensible surfing restrictions had dissolved and the “short board revolution” was really taking off with isolated pockets of structured competition surfing beginning to emerge. During this time, competitive surfing started to gain momentum in other parts of the world and it was 1976 that saw the first World Surfing Championship crowning Australian Peter Townend as the first ever World Champ (ASP. 2014). This proved to be the embryonic stages of the Association of Professional Surfers, which has since developed into the leading governing body of competitive surfing. By cultivating close ties with the ever-growing surf industry, the ASP and the “big three” Australian surf companies have operated symbiotically to promote and profit from the commercialisation of surfing the world over. Rather ostentatiously presented competitions are now a large part of the costly but effective marketing strategies of the surf industry giants. Last years finale saw Australian Mick Fanning win the 2013 World Title and attracted over 10,000 spectators to Hawaii’s North Shore. Thanks to the Internet the event also set a new record for the largest audience to ever witness an action sports event with more than 3.5 million fans streaming the event via the online webcast (Surfline. 2014).

  Today, with the surf industry currently riding the crest of an unprecedented economic boom, the sport has almost entirely “lost its image of being a thing for hippies and stoners, of being kinda ragtag. Surfing today is the Silicon Valley CEO. It's the brain surgeon. It's the super-athlete. It's dad, mom, and the kids. It's also significant business with the median American surfer earning $75,000 a year, and in 2010 some $6.3 billion was spent on boards, wetsuits, sunglasses, and other surf-related clothing and accessories. With the sport now swelling in Europe, China, and Korea, some analysts predict that the global surf industry will generate more than $13 billion by 2017 (Kvinta. 2013).” The huge success of surfing’s commercialisation in Australia has finally put an end to the long struggle of many Australian surfers who’d fought for the social validation of their pursuit. Synchronously however, the crowd-less waves of yesteryear have never seemed so appealing with increasing numbers joining the line-up every summer. Those old-tales of deep sea-monsters have been replaced by legendary surfing triumphs going down on days of perfect conditions with no-one around at the spots now notorious for the density of their crowds.  It goes without saying that surfing in Australia is now rich with nostalgia.Today, commercial prosperity has meant that the surfing lifestyle is attracting tourist operators, entrepreneurs and marketing executives the world over. It’s finally safe to say that the economic potential of this stubborn social movement is now being fully realised. 

Surf shops can be now found as far flung from the ocean as Kansas City and the Czech Republic, so it comes as no real surprise that surfing had found it’s way into the cultural seaside mecca of Barcelona City. With history seemingly repeating itself, the surfer’s of Barcelona, have had to seek their validation just as the early Australian surfers had done. Not only are they challenging the traditional ideas of the Catalan identity, but they’re taunted for being completely committed to a past time that requires something they seldom get enough of -waves. Just like skiing or snowboarding in Australia, surfing in Barcelona is not an oxymoron, (Niega, 2010) it does happen, but the season is short and the conditions are rarely world-class. This hasn’t restricted the calibre of surfing coming out of Barcelona because all of the surfers that are out there, are there because they want to be. They’re really out there for the love of it whereas in Australia surfing has become so mainstream that for some it’s almost become a duty, or rite of passage (Miller. 2011).

Given that surfing occupies this liminal and often dangerous space, the thrill of wave riding isn’t accessible by those inexperienced with oceanic oscillations, movements and currents. As was the case initially in Australia, this has meant that only the fit, the agile, the young, brave and seaworthy are currently pursuing the sport in Barcelona. Thus, those taking to surfing are being commonly misunderstood by the older Catalan predispositions. In a time of economic turmoil, Spanish surfers are subject to similar branding that faced the early Australian surfers. Stereotypes such as the hedonistic ‘Other’, the vagrant, the dropout or the degenerate are all reflections of a collective cultural anxiety toward this nonchalant behaviour during a time of National financial hardship. Such denunciations not only reflect the anxieties about the country’s economic situation but also serve to veil a reasonable and enduring apprehension toward a rough sea. As was the case in Australia, this has lead to surfer’s in Barcelona being marginalised for being too busy surfing when they should be working or serving to the common military, political, religious or corporate agendas. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now conceivable that within the negotiations of these social rigidities lies part of the compelling temptation that today draws millions of adventurous surfers seawards the world-over. Surfing has been labelled as counter to traditional dogmatic views, as anti-authoritarian, individualistic and rebellious. These values have become increasingly popular in a climate of societal pessimism toward the effects of an industrialisation that’s led to unprecedented environmental destruction. The European financial system, built on unbridled growth is flailing and the capitalist profit motive is seeing that the rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer. It is within such a hostile global situation that surfing’s renegade lifestyle has muscled its way into pop-culture. In doing so it has allowed the desire of many to overcome their intergenerational fear of the ocean and bask in the simple and free pleasures derived from riding a wave. It is within such a multidimensional context that I arrived at the Barcelona airport to see for myself what it meant to be a surfer in this bustling, sleepless city. These four essays are works of fiction that are largely based on my wanderings through the city, the interviews I conducted and conversations I had with the locals. I’ve structured them along a timeline to illustrate the historical parallels between Australian and Catalan surfing, hoping that my comparisons will highlight the many differences and similarities between two surf cultures from opposing sides of the planet.

We were standing in the unseasonably warm morning sun and looking south along the manmade beaches that were lined with über-modern hotels as a group of Asian tourists silently whirred past on segways.  Sergio waved his pointed finger out over the whole landscape, as if to summon the memories of his youth, a time when the vast coastline before us was a very different place. “There were huge sand dunes right there and that whole beach was completely filled with shacks spreading as far as the Barceloneta,” he said.

  Sergio had kindly agreed to meet after I’d been told to email him with a request to talk about his experiences growing up on the beaches of Barcelona. He was very fit for a man of his age, well dressed and with weathered, leathery brown skin that had presumably seen its fair share of the Mediterranean sunshine. He’d suggested meeting at the bronze statue of an Olympic diver that commemorated the games of 94’. It was a fitting place to rendezvous, perched at the end of a quiet break wall that had been built to prevent the winter swells from washing away the imported Egyptian sands. There was a striking view over the beaches that were bustling with solar powered people who were jogging, playing volleyball, rollerblading, cycling, tanning, taking photographs and swimming as the peaks of Barcelona’s buildings loomed in the background. He told me that he walked along the wall every morning as part of his daily routine. He was an animated man who was apparently pleased with the idea of sharing his story with a stranger’s pair of ears that were eager to hear it. We introduced ourselves and when I asked where he was from we skipped any further small talk and he took charge of our dialogue,  “I arrived in Barcelona in 1943,” he started. “I came with my Mother and my younger sister from a small town in the south of Spain. We arrived here by train, in one of those old trains that were used for cattle.  We were extremely poor. Poverty was widespread back then. My father was already here and at first we lived together in a cave before building our shack by the beach. We had to build at night time so no one would notice because building the shacks was illegal back then.”

It was hard for me to picture these slums ever belonging on these now manicured and clean beaches. A huge mega-yacht cruised past behind us, totally juxtaposed with Sergio’s recollections. He didn’t even notice it and continued on narrating his story as though he’d told it a hundred times before. “The living conditions here were terrible, there were gullies between houses with streams of waste from the gas factories that would make the water boil. The sewers were horrific. You had to hold your nose just to walk past Bogatell because of the stench and we lived less than 50 meters away just over there,” he said, pointing toward a group of girls playing beach volleyball. “Our shack was tiny, only 3 square meters; you could barely fit a bed inside. We called it ‘The Cot’. My mother and sister would sleep inside and my father and I would sleep on the beach. We would earn some money picking olives in the wintertime and by working in the fields through the summer. We didn’t earn very much at all, it was a really difficult time and often there was nothing to eat so we’d have to eat grass.” I was taken aback; I didn’t know it was possible to eat grass. I thought maybe I’d misheard him or that it was a language barrier mishap, the meaning perhaps lost in translation. Sensing my confusion, he looked at me and nodded with raised eyebrows, completely at ease in sharing these hardships with a stranger he laughed and repeated, “Seriously, we would eat grass!” 

 The waves were completely flat so I was happy to spend the day away from the beach and exploring the city. I was excited about what was planned for my day as I’d arranged to get up to the peak of El Carmel in the Gràcia district of Barcelona to wander through Park Güell and meet a guy named Evan. I’d wanted to meet the first guy to ever ride a surfboard in Barcelona and after some fairly extensive investigative work I was eventually told that Evan Illas was the man I had to talk to. He’d suggested meeting at ‘The Wave’ because it wasn’t far from his house. It was an easy landmark to find that was less crowded than other parts of the park and he no doubt knew that I’d appreciate it. Like many of the tourist hotspots in Barcelona, the Park had been designed by Antoni Gaudi and was a feat of organic architectural beauty.  When I got there Evan was standing inside the stunning masonry of a giant almond shaped barrel.  The structure was basically an elaborate and giant retaining wall that adopted an unusual use of biomimicry by imitating the form of a breaking wave using angulated columns that supported the road above.  

My long sun-bleached hair had presumably given me away as the student from Byron Bay because he waved over to me with familiarity as though we’d met before. We did our introductions and I followed his lead as we started off along the footpath up the hill. He knew what I wanted to talk about, and from one surfer to another we started with the usual surf banter about recent conditions and the swell forecasts. Taking it from the top, I asked how long he’d been surfing and where he’d started.

“My first surf was on Huntington Beach, California in 1974. I moved there with my parents because my father was an engineer and had a contract there. I remember my first wave, the first time I had that amazing sensation where you feel as if your moving so fast that time itself slows down.” I smiled at his choice of words and nodded contently as he’d triggered memories of my first experiences. “We moved back to Barcelona in 1978 and I brought my board back with me. It was a Bing twin-fin that went really well in the waves here. Better than what many of the guys are riding these days.” I’d told him that I’d noticed how many of the surfers were riding ultra refined equipment. Boards that were in my opinion better suited to an aggressive top-to-bottom style of surfing that was usually only adopted on bigger days. Commonly in Byron Bay when the waves were small people would prefer to ride logs or fishes and take a more lateral approach to the wave. He said it was because of the fashion, “everyone wants to surf like Kelly Slater at 10 foot Cloudbreak, the only problem is that they’re usually surfing a 2 foot Mediterranean shore break.” Being the guy who basically introduced surfing to the city, he could justify such sweeping generalizations of the Catalan surf scene and he did so candidly.   Arriving at the summit of El Carmel, the view was absolutely breathtaking, a 360 degree panorama over the park below with the city spanning out to the coast and the seas’ horizon blending with the skyline. He was obviously very proud of his city and rightly so. We found a seat near a young Argentine busker who was looping some hypnotic electric guitar riffs and creating some really beautiful music.  From our vantage point we could make out the whole coastline and Evan started pointing out and naming the different surf spots with an interesting backstory about how many of the spots got their names. He told me of a handful of memorable sessions he’d had at different spots and I enjoyed hearing them.

“I wasn't the first person to surf in Cataluña though,” he said. “That honor goes to Esteban Rosés, another Catalan guy living in Biarritz who would surf when visiting relatives in the early 70s. We bumped into each other occasionally and would surf together but aside from that, for the first ten years or so, I had this whole coast to myself. I was in one of the busiest cities in Europe and could get out there and be completely alone. It was pretty amazing when I think about it now. But honestly, it was kind of lonely so I was always trying to recruit new surf buddies. People would approach me to ask what I was doing, this would happen all the time and I made some great friends by introducing them to surfing.”   He took a moment looking out over the city and I he seemed to appreciate a quiet moments reflection of all the people he’d met through his love of the sea.  The sun was starting to fall as he continued. “By the late 80s, the windsurfing scene had arrived to the Med and a whole generation of teenagers had started coming to the beaches in the fall, winter and spring. Eventually, they started to notice that some days there were good, surfable waves and they’d try to surf them with their windsurfing boards. They did pretty well but those boards just were made for wave riding so they started to bring surfboards back from their travels like I had done. I’d say that was really the first generation of Catalan surfers but it was still pretty underground at that point; there weren’t any surf shops in Cataluña or anything like that. Bodyboarding was becoming pretty popular at that point too. That was about the time I left, I went to the Caribbean with my family and only came back three years ago. For the rest of the story you probably want to track down Felipe Niega. He was one of the windsurfer guys and he went on to be the editor of the first surf magazine in Spain. He knows his stuff.”

“The practice, experience and culture of surfing has so many parallels with allied pursuits such as, for instance, snowboarding and skateboarding. Such parallels include an ambivalent or even oppositional stance to authority, a concern with a sense of authenticity, an individualist emphasis on a direct unmediated experience, which is nevertheless expressively shared in relation to both an almost tribal communitas and a more competitive pursuit of subcultural capital (Ford & Brown, 2006).”

Kicking then pushing with full effort, my blistered back foot swings slowly forward before swooping down along Gaudi’s decorative seashells on the tiled pavement. My body slowly rising to face forward before rhythmically twisting down again as I coerce my skateboard through a right turn and pass under the arched red brickwork of the Arc de Triomf. Larger than any barrel I’d ever try to negotiate my surfboard through, I look up, and pretend to surf through the huge structure. The Arc is perhaps less triumphant than its Parisian counterpart but its an interesting addition to the cityscape no less that was built as the main access gate for the 1888 Barcelona World Fair.

I was on my way to the beach, just a five-minute coast away from my house. I’d heeded the advice of a surf shop owner who had insisted I hire a skateboard from him, saying, “side-walk surfing is really fun in Barcelona. When we can’t surf, we skate.” The skateboard he offered me was from Sideways, a popular surf factory outlet less than an hour from my home in Australia where everything is fraction of the full price thanks to an annual surplus of stock and cheap Chinese labour. A bizarre coincidence I thought to myself, indicative of just how small our globalised world has become.

Whilst Barcelona was ranked amongst the top 10 surfing cities in the world by Australian surf magazine STAB, it was also voted as the top city in the world for skateboarding by Transworld magazine. Testament to this accolade, I was moving through the streets and constantly marvelling at how smooth the cement, the seamless transitions from road to footpath and how there were banks, ramps and ledges everywhere. The entire city felt as though a skateboarder had designed it. When I arrived at the Surf House Café, my new favourite hangout right on the beach, I mentioned to one of the waiters how fun it was to skate around. An avid skater himself who’d spent some time in Australia, we struck up an interesting conversation about the skateboarding scene. He told me that skateboarding had been big in Barça for as long as he could remember. “Everyone used to skate here, all through the 90’s everyone was skating and nobody was really surfing. It’s changing now though because they’ve introduced a $300 on the spot fine for grinding a ledge and they cops are really regulating it.Hepas of them are getting into surfing now. It’s crazy how skateboarding had spawned from surfing in California; where here it’s almost like surfing has come from skating.”

“That is crazy,” I agreed. “It’s gone full-circle.” "We still go skating when it’s flat though, and snowboard the Pyrenees in the winter. A lot of my mates have gotten into downhill now because it’s more like carving on the wave. We go every Thursday if you’re keen?”

“The embodied surfer looks, acts and feels according to his or her surfing self. The surfer is identified by motion in the water and on the beach, and in turn, the motion of the water and the beach identifies the surfer. A surfer’s projected style and behavior is a way in which a person can be read. The ‘lens’ that a surfer adopts upon becoming apart of the surfing subculture influences their outlook upon life (Miller. 2011).”  

After my Nachos, I put my wetsuit on and grabbed a mini-mal off the rack. It was a beautiful sunny day with several two-to-three foot peaks along the beach to choose from. Each peak had at least twenty surfers to compete with so the trick was to find the spot with the least people. I paddled out beyond the heavy shore break and entered the line-up. After catching a handful of really fun waves, I had to pull myself out of the moment, remembering that I was there to do some research of the line-up.

Similar to back in Byron Bay, the guy-to-girl ratio was about 80/20 in favour of the men. The age of the surfers was far less varied however with almost everyone being between 18 and 26 years old. There didn’t seem to be any young kids out there and no old-blokes either which I’d hypothesised was a sign of a sport still in it’s early developments, knowing that the older you get the harder it becomes to learn. Aside from a few novice Stand-Up-Paddleboards, almost everyone was on high-performance equipment. A handful of guys were surfing really well whilst many others seemed to struggle with their board’s lack of width and volume, slowing them down and giving them the wobbles. This is a common problem in Australia also, with many surfers being sold the delusion that a surfboard designed for the worlds best will make you surf just like them. In reality, that only comes from practice, and lots of it. In the meantime, I’m of the opinion that there is more fun to be had riding equipment better suited to your height, weight, level and the type of waves you’re most likely to be surfing rather than following marketing hype.

I noticed that everyone shared a white complexion, which surprised me somewhat given Spain’s proximity to Africa and the amount of people of African and Middle Eastern descent that I’d seen within the city. I made an effort to meet some people in the water and met a couple from Germany, a guy from Switzerland and another guy from Brazil. Being such an international city it seemed logical that many of the surfers would come from elsewhere. They all spoke great English and were wearing all the newest gear so I couldn’t help but assume that it seemed to be a fairly middle-class activity. Having walked through the streets and seen well-dressed, working class men who were begging for money, it was clear that times were really tough. Finding the time for such recreation seemed to be a thing left for the privileged, or at least the employed and middle-class.  

Returning to the Surf House, I got changed and unpacked my laptop, tapping into the Wi-Fi to tend to a Skype meeting with Felipe. Some of the guys in the café were friends of his so when I answered his call they jumped in front of the screen and surprised him. We all had a laugh and Felipe told me about his new career with Wave Garden, a European wave pool company that offered a long artificial wave that was taking the world by storm. I told him about my meeting with Evan and how I’d learnt about those early windsurfing days in Barça. He laughed, telling me how difficult it was to ride those boards.  He then told me how much the beaches have changed since back then. “When the Olympic games came in 92” he said, “ it saw to a complete overhaul of the whole area. They literally brought sand to the beach, all the way from Egypt because they wanted nice white sand to appeal to the tourists.”

“That is bizarre!” I said. “Not only that,” he went on. “All of those break walls you see, they were built to stop the sand from being washed away with the winter swells. The problem was they also stopped the sand from being washed in. They’d completely messed with the natural longshore drift of the beach and ruined a lot of great surf. It costs millions to replace the sand so the City Council proposed to build a break wall that would stop the waves from getting in altogether, thus stopping the sand escaping.”

“No way” I said with disbelief. “When was that? Was there a protest or anything?” “Yeah, that was in 2006, and it prompted the first ever demonstration on the Barceloneta beach. Over 300 surfers attended a peaceful protest under a SOS SURF BCN banner. The demonstration made the 9 o’clock news that night and the first pages of the next day’s newspapers. A fierce battle between the A.C.S. (Association of Catalan Surfers) and the City Council followed, the Council tried to portray the surfers as a bunch of selfish citizens who didn’t care about the erosion problems. The A.C.S., meanwhile, maintained that technically both interests could be satisfied at no extra cost. After lots of pressure from the media and the public, the City Council agreed to leave some open beach space for the surfers which is why you were able to just go surfing today.”

I told him about the sand-pumping predicament ruining the iconic Australian surf break, Kirra Point and about the Bastion Point struggle to protect their waves from break-walls. I found it so interesting to learn how surfers had to fight for their waves the world over. “It gets worse though” he said. “We still have the police to deal with.”

“What do you mean?”I replied.

“Well, every now and then, the Guardia Urbana will come to the beach and confiscate surfboards. If you protest or don’t surrender your board, they’ll give you a €1,500 on the spot fine for practicing the sport on the beach. They don’t give an explanation either. They just claim that they’re doing their job and following orders to make sure that surfers don’t ride on the beaches that are supposedly meant for swimming. It’s ridiculous. I have my suspicions that it has something to do with the City Council being jaded about the surfers protesting their plans. “Far out,” I said, “that sounds like what the surfers were dealing with in Australia over a hundred years ago. Amused by this comment he agreed saying, “History repeats itself. I guess this microcosm of a surfing culture in Barcelona is still going through its teething stages... At least it keeps things interesting!”

Ultimately, what I learnt from this incredible trip to Barcelona is that history does indeed repeat itself. The fact that there remains to be a hierarchy of social activities that continues to favour and validate pastimes presenting economic opportunities or commonly associated with affluence is indicative of a culture reigned by a profit driven system.  Initially,  this was to the detriment of surfing culture until some savvy entrepreneurship capitalised on its counter-cultural representations and subsequently skyrocketed surfing into the stock market and onto the world stage. Since then, there seems to have been a smoother transition for the more recent surfing subcultures like Barcelona to introduce surfing to their communities but there has nevertheless been power struggles with police and councils imposing their restrictions on the sport. 

Here's a list of the sources I drew from for my project. If you're interested in my assignment and would like to go a little deeper them check them out...

ASP. 2014. ASP History. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.aspworldtour.com/about-asp/asp-history/. [Accessed 02 January 14].

  Billington, R, Strawbridge, S, Greensides, L & Fitzsimons, A 1991. Culture and Society. 1st ed. Hong Kong: Macmillan Publishers.

  Evans, Paul. 2012. The World’s Best 10 Cities For Surfers: Barcelona. (Online) Available at: http://stabmag.com/the-worlds-best-10-cities-for-surfers-barcelona/. (Accessed 11 November 13).

  Felipe Niega. 2010. Life and Surf in Barcelona. [Online] Available at: http://www.driftsurfing.eu/index.php/archives/3807. [Accessed 10 December 13].

  Fiske, 1989, Understanding Popular Culture, New York: Routledge

  Ford, N and Brown, D, 2006, Surfing and Social Theory: Experience, Embodiment and Narrative of the Dream Glide, Abington, UK: Routledge. Kvinta, P, 2013. Surfonomics 101. CNN Money, [Online]. 1, 1. Available at:http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/06/05/surfonomics-101/ [Accessed 09 December 2013].

  Marcus, B, 2002. From Polynesia, With Love, The History of Surfing From Captain Cook to the Present. Surfing For Life, [Online]. 1-2. Available at: http://www.surfingforlife.com/history.html[Accessed 01 January 2014]. Miller, T.C, 2011. Australian and Italian Surfing, A Comparative Study. 1st ed. Sydney: Sydney University.

  Olive, R , 2006. Mingling, The Citizenship of Surfing. 1st ed. Sydney: Southern Cross University. Pons, P, O, 2009. Cultures of Mass Tourism, Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities. 1st ed. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing. Rollins, C, 2012. Live With Aloha.. Patagonia, [Online]. Available at:http://www.patagonia.com.au/journal/2012/live-with-aoha-gerry-lopez-surf-is-where-you-find-it-tour/[Accessed 05 December 2013].

  Schwoch, J.  & White, M , 2006. Questions of Method in Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Shantytown. The Forgotten City. 2011  (DVD) Alonzo Carnicer and Sara Grimal, Spain: Televisio de Catalunya

Slater, K, 2008. Love Is Everything. Stab , [Online]. Available at: http://stabmag.com/kelly-slater-love/ [Accessed 24 December 2013].

  Stark, A, 2010. The Man Who Runs Surfing Australia. Coastalwatch, [Online]. Available at: http://www.coastalwatch.com/surfing/7745/andrew-stark-the-man-who-runs-surfing-australia [Accessed 02 January 2014]. Surfline. 2014. Vans Triple Crown of Surfing Sets Webcasting Audience Record. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/_105147/. [Accessed 01 January 14].

Warshaw, M. 2003. The Encyclopaedia of Surfing. Orlando: Harcourt

  Warshaw, M. 2010. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books

Taken from our International Issue, this is our 10 Best Cities to skate in the world. Your next skate trip awaits.

There's an ancient Greek proverb that comes to mind when I think about La Sagrada Familia: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."