The Surf
Portugal has been attracting surfers to its shores for decades, it offers quality surf year long with excellent sandy beach and point breaks.
The Algarve encompassing the extreme south western tip of the European continent boast 100 miles of coastline with some of the most dramatic surf beaches to be found in Europe.
During the sixties, there was already a handful of Portuguese surfers that managed to catch waves in a country where there were no surf shops or surfboard shapers.
In 1976 Surfer Magazine published a news article that made Portugal well-known all over the surfing world.
The first surf competition in Portugal took place in Ericeira, in 1977 and the second competition in Peniche. Step by step EPSA (European Professional Surfing Association), WQS (World Qualify Series), and even some years later WCT (World Championship Tour) competitions began to discover how much Portugal had to offer in terms of waves and cultural richness to the surfers.
The first surf boards made in Portugal came out to the market in the late 70ies and early 80ies. However nowadays there is a great amount of shapers, wetsuit factories, web sites and specialized surfing magazines, in Portugal. Surfers, such as Tiago Pires, have raised the competitive level in Portugal and reached the highest professional level possible, competing in the top 44 WCT.
There are more than 60 thousand registered surfers in a country of 10 million people. That makes Portugal one of the biggest surfing nations in Europe.
Check details about the trip to Algarve
History
The Phoenicians had established trading ports along the coast circa 1000 BC. The Carthaginians founded Portus Hanibalis — known today as Portimão — in circa 550 BC.
The Roman occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the second century BC took in the Algarve, and there are important Roman remains in Lagos.
The Visigoths took the area in the fifth century, being expelled by the Moors in 716. It was the latter who named the region Al-Gharb, the country of the west, and they occupied it for longer than any other part of Portugal.
Alfonso III finally took the Algarve from the Moors in 1250 (so completing the reconquest of Portugal). In the fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator used the Algarve as the jumping-off point for the voyages of discovery which laid the foundations of the Portuguese Empire.
He established an important school of navigation at Sagres, and made Lagos a ship-building centre.
But the Portuguese capital was in Lisbon, to which most of the colonial wealth went, and the Algarve entered a period of economic decline. The great earthquake of 1755 which destroyed much of Lisbon hit the Algarve hard as well, and the subsequent reconstruction left many of its towns with a distinctive, rationalist architectural style.
In 1807 when Junot was leading the first Napoleonic invasion in the north of Portugal, the Algarve was occupied by the Spanish troops of Manuel Godoy. The Algarve became the first part of Portugal to liberate itself from Spanish occupation, in the rebellion of Olhão in 1808.
Nothing would have such a sweeping effect on the region until the tourist boom of the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineteen.
Special Offer: 250 euros
