The Surfers Journal
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Marc Durà: I’m based in Barcelona, which is on the Mediterranean. Kepa came to surf in 2017, and we got some good waves—which is rare here. It’s a closed, small sea, so our waves are mostly storm-made windswell from right off the coast. Regarding our surfing history, it’s very young here compared to other parts of the world. The benefit is that we have thousands of miles of coastline where, if you know right where to be on the right day, you can still manage to get good, empty surf with no one else around—potentially in places that nobody has ever surfed before. Naturally, we started talking about that potential on the other sides of the sea, in North Africa and the Middle East.
Kepa Acero: In the eastern and southern parts of the Mediterranean, there isn’t much information about the surf or the setups. I’m always searching for good waves with few people or in places that maybe haven’t been surfed before. Sometimes you get that, and sometimes you don’t, but for me it’s the possibility of finding a place that raises my eyebrows that keeps me pushing. As we’d learn, though, certain places can prove more difficult than you can imagine.
Marc Durà: We came across the concept of Arcadia. For the Greeks, Arcadia was the idea of unspoiled nature, of paradise. As surfers, we’re constantly looking for something similar. A lot of ancient cultures were based in the Med—established thousands of years before Christ—and they were travelers and explorers. So we thought of merging surfing exploration with the region’s history, specifically that of the Phoenicians, a civilization that originated in the eastern Mediterranean and sailed throughout the area, settling it with city-states. Our original plan was to follow their path through five modern-day countries: Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Italy, and, finally, Greece, where the idea of Arcadia was born.
Kepa Acero: Because of the short-period swell and the constantly changing conditions, we had to wait and wait and wait. Then, in December 2018, right around Christmas, conditions aligned, and we went to Lebanon.
“That particular wave, we weren’t allowed to even get close to it. We had to tread very lightly in certain places.”
Marc Durà
Marc Durà: Beirut, the capital, was once called the Paris of the Middle East. Then the country went through a 15-year civil war. It’s a place that’s gone through heavy changes. It’s delicate. But what we found was an open and friendly country. I can only say beautiful things about it and about how people treated us. They took care of us. The food was amazing. There was snow in the mountains, and huge forests with cedar trees, which was the original timber the Phoenicians used for their boats.
Kepa Acero: We also got surf—good surf. There was an initial swell that we’d tracked, then a secondary swell that filled in a few days later. We had waves almost every day for the entire week we were there. And we found a dedicated surf community. For us, coming from places that are heavily crowded, I think we tend to be a little bit protective with how we communicate about waves. But crowding is not a factor there. They openly share everything. We found out later that with where the country is located in the sea and the way storms behave in that area, they have waves all the time. They surf all year long, which is not the case in the western part of the Med. I thought it was going to be small, so I only brought a couple of twinnies. Then, suddenly, there was a day that was solid 8 to 10 feet at one of the points.
Marc Durà: One of the better waves was in front of a military base. In a lot of countries in North Africa and the Middle East, the military is no joke. You don’t wander around with big cameras and drones. That particular wave, we weren’t allowed to even get close to it. We had to tread very lightly in certain places.
Kepa Acero: It took another year until we made it to Tunisia—Christmas 2019, when the conditions and our schedules lined up again. When it was time, we had to act fast. It was two or three days from making the call to being in the country. We’d done research and knew that there were a number of pointbreaks, so we chose one that looked scenic and cinematic but that was also protected from the wind and the storm. It’s a beautiful setup. People tend to imagine North Africa as dry deserts. The southern and eastern parts of Tunisia, which border Libya, they’re desert. But in the western and northern parts, which border Algeria and are the places where we surfed, it’s green, and there are mountains marching toward the sea—the total opposite of what you’d think.
Marc Durà: There’s a strong wind pattern in the western Mediterranean, a northwest wind that blows from central Europe toward the coast of Tunisia. It brings a lot of moisture, so it rains a lot in that particular area—and it’s where you get most of the bigger swells. Luckily, we found a wave that not only was hit by one of those swells, but was protected enough to be good.
Kepa Acero: We saw two other people surfing, and one of them wasn’t even from the country. There was no surf community or even surf-culture influence—its own kind of paradise, green and empty. We stayed for 10 days. The swell was hitting right when we arrived. Then, when the swell was gone, we got to experience the country itself.
Marc Durà: There’s a blend of people descended from those who have come through this area for ages. In the western part of the country, where we surfed, it felt a little bit more traditional and anchored in the past. It was very quiet while we were there—an old-world feel. We were supposed to travel to Algeria immediately afterward, since the swell was picking back up. We were only an hour and a half away from the place we wanted to get to in Algeria, but the region doesn’t work like that. It isn’t as easy as just driving across the border. We had to go back home to even apply for the visas.
Kepa Acero: That was the start of the problems—the beginning of the end.
Mark Durà: If you think getting visas in Western countries is hard, Algeria is a whole different level. They don’t want journalists or anyone with a camera around. It’s a heavily militarized country. I made 14 trips to the embassy just to request our visas. When we finally got close, there was an uprising against the former president. Suddenly, Algeria canceled all tourism. We needed to find an alternate location to keep pushing ahead on the project. Egypt made sense. We started making plans, but COVID happened, and everything shut down.
Kepa Acero: We spent the next couple of years trying to make sense out of how to keep going forward. It’s a story of failure, in one sense. In another, it’s a story of how endless the chase is.
“We saw two other people surfing, and one of them wasn’t even from the country. There was no surf-culture influence—its own kind of paradise.”
Kepa Acero
Marc Durà: In March 2021, I traveled to Egypt by myself on a scouting mission for an incoming swell that I was tracking. There’s a big sandbar at the mouth of the Nile River, and from satellite images it looked like it had the potential to be an Egyptian Skeleton Bay on the right day. But it was hard going. In Egypt, once you’re out of the tourist areas near the pyramids and temples and tombs, everything is difficult. The army wants no cameras anywhere, especially near the coast, where they have bases and watch over these massive fish-farm operations and other foreign business interests. There’s no proper road that hugs the beach on the delta. When I’d eventually find a route in, I’d end up at the gate of a base or private facility. I made it about 200 meters [650 feet] from the shore at the sandbar. I could see waves breaking elsewhere along the beach, but not the sandbank I’d traveled to photograph. The army would not let me any farther. But it was breaking. I could hear it.
Kepa Acero: We still found Arcadia—at least parts of it, and definitely the spirit of it. The concept itself shifted my own understanding of looking for perfect waves. It’s been thou-sands of years since Arcadia was conceived. Civilizations have risen and collapsed and risen again. Technology has changed. But we’re still searching for the same things in the same places, and those things are still out there.
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