This wave is for her: How women have conquered their space in surfing

It was almost seven years ago, in 2018. And it was, coincidentally, March 8, International Women’s Day. Sonia Ziani was surfing with a group of friends on the beach in Zarautz, when suddenly she realized, surprised: “Have you noticed? Right now there are 12 of us in the water and six of us are girls.” It stuck in her mind. That was a palpable demonstration that something was changing in a traditionally male-dominated sport, in which the few women who dared to show up had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of beach.

It is true that a few had already managed, through great effort, to make a place for themselves at the top among sponsors and competitions, but now, finally, many more are joining en masse at the grassroots level. In 2010, the Spanish Surfing Federation had 5,000 members, 1,000 of whom were women; by 2015, the number had risen to 18,000 and 9,000, respectively; and last year, to 38,900 and 36,400, almost a 50/50 split. And the municipality of Zarautz, in the Basque Country, one of the main points through which the sport arrived in Spain just over half a century ago, a reference destination for surfing in Europe, is a privileged witness to all that is happening.

Here, the bustle of people clad in neoprene, board in hand, arriving at the beach ready to jump into the water is continuous on any given Monday in February. In the afternoon, classes are held by some surf schools that, for some years now, have not stopped their activity in the winter months. The first to start doing so was Shelter, the club led by Aritz Aranburu, one of the Spanish surfers who have reached the top of the world surfing elite. Two of his students are the twins Nahia and Kora Calderón, who at only 12 years old have already caught the attention of some lovers of the sport. Nahia likes to compete, and it shows in the rankings. Kora, however, is more of a free-surfer, which means doing it on your own in the absence of championships or judges, but which usually refers to athletes who make a living creating content for sponsors and other brands in the surfing and travel sector.

Without leaving Zarautz, the two twins have brilliant female role models for each discipline. To start with, there is Nadia Erostarbe, 24, who last year obtained an Olympic diploma at the Paris Games and has just become the first Spanish woman to debut in the World Surf League Championship Tour, the best circuit in the world. But there is also Ainara Aymat, 28, one of the paradigms of free-surfing who, with a magnetic personality in and out of the water, travels the world thanks to various sponsorships, surfing, and by turning her experiences into audiovisual projects. In addition, Kora and Nahia not only have people to look up to, but also to the sides, as it is natural for them to practice surfing (they have done so since they were five years old) surrounded by both boys and girls.

It hasn’t always been like this. Right here, on the beach in Zarautz, half a century earlier, another girl called Mar Eizaguirre had to wait on the shore for her brother and his friends to get tired and leave the board with her so she could try it out. In the early 1970s, locals and vacationers (those who had money and brought new boards, even from as far afield as the United States) formed a group of about 20 or 30 people. Among them, there were only two girls who dared to surf: one from Bilbao called Isabel, and Mar herself. “I swapped my brother for my first board, for a T-shirt; I’d bought it in France and he loved it,” says Eizaguirre. The panorama has changed a lot since then, as highlighted by the girls and teenagers on this February afternoon, with their wetsuits and their colorful boards, moving between the sand and the water.

What probably hasn’t changed is the essence of a sport that, once it gets you hooked, doesn’t let go, turning you into a being permanently scrutinizing the apps that tell you when and where there will be good waves, at which point you’ll run there as soon as you have the chance. A being that will plan your vacations and travel the world looking for the best beaches to get on the board. When surfers try to explain it, they talk about a connection with the ocean, of adventure, of the unexpected; the knowledge that what is going to happen next will be different from everything that came before. “I don’t know what got me hooked, to be honest. Of course, catching good waves, tubes are like an addiction… That’s it, I think, the adrenaline, that dream of catching the best wave of your life,” explains Erostarbe.

For 34-year-old Sonia Ziani, it is also a kind of therapy. She has participated in several documentaries about women and surfing and has starred in another with Portuguese big wave enthusiast Nic von Rupp, with whom she traveled in a van to the most special places for this sport in the province of Gipuzkoa. But, beyond that, she says, surfing has changed her life. “I have thought so many times about what it would be like if I hadn’t gone into the Pukas shop that day. Today, I would probably be a married woman, with children, at the service of my husband.” Born in Orio to Moroccan parents who emigrated first to Germany and then to the Basque Country, she is talking about the day when, aged 18, she went to buy a sweatshirt — “the typical one that says ‘Surfing the Basque Country’” — and met Adur Letamendia, son of the co-founders of the pioneering surfboard factory that eventually became the brand most associated with the arrival and development of surfing in the area; for years, they organized a top-level international competition in Zarautz. The fact is that, between chat and coincidences, a job offer was forged to be a shop assistant at their surf school during the summer.

“My parents forbade me from accepting it, so I left home. I didn’t go far, to be honest — I went to my brother’s house — but soon they accepted it and I came back,” she says. It was the first time of many that she dared to defy her parents because of surfing. Sonia loves them and defends them — “It’s the way they were brought up and the way they believed it was best for me” — but it took a lot of time and effort to make them understand that she was going to follow her own path: when she surfed in secret, when they forbade her again, aged 20, from going on her first trip with friends — to the Maldives — in search of waves…

She no longer works at Pukas — she is a manager at a local boilermaker’s shop and is studying law with the Open University — but she recounts all this in the brand’s warehouse in Oiartzun, where she has just done a photoshoot surrounded by boards. During the conversation, there are several moments in which emotion interrupts the story. When she talks about her family and surfing as her great tool for emancipation, when she explains how they helped her at Pukas — they let her use the equipment, they kept it for her when she couldn’t take it home, they adapted schedules for her during exam time — and when she remembers the death of her friend Óscar Serra, in Mexico in the summer of 2021, while he was surfing a huge wave in Puerto Escondido. “It was hard for me to get back into the water… I recently went on a trip to Indonesia, I was there for a month, and it was wonderful. It helped me reconnect.”

“Yes, it affected me a lot. What happened was that when I went in, I felt connected to him and that made me very sad. But I managed to turn it around and start to feel lucky to still be able to do this, which is what he liked the most.” On the other end of the phone, Ainara Aymat talks about her friend and her deceased boyfriend. She is currently in South Africa, filming a documentary that she is also directing. “I started surfing when I was five, when I was eight I started competing and when I was 12 I was already on the European circuit. There weren’t many girls, at first I had to compete with the boys,” she says. At 21, 22, it was almost impossible for her to combine surfing with her university studies; she has a degree in biomechanics. “I was lucky that I signed with Vans and they didn’t ask me to do competitions,” she explains.

When she was freed from the pressure of tournaments, says Ziani, who has known her since she was little, “all the potential she had” was truly realized. In addition, her personality, totally removed from the cliché image of a surfer girl, has won over fans. A lover of nature and chess, she shaved her hair, without further ado, one day in 2019 because she passed by a hair salon that said on the door that they donated it to make wigs for children with cancer. “In the end, I think everyone has to find what they like, what makes them creative, and it turned out that this was my thing,” she says.

Ainara is one of the friends who accompanied Sonia on that March 8 when there were as many girls as boys in the water. She also remembers it perfectly. Why are more and more women coming to the sport now? There could be many reasons, but one is surely that there are more role models today: “It’s true that internationally there have been more girls who have been talked about a lot, and people here have also been motivated and have got their act together… I don’t know.”

Here, at least in Zarautz, Mar Eizaguirre didn’t have one when she started competing, as soon as there were girls’ championships. She says that the girls had to compete in the spaces that the boys left for them, in the worst circumstances. “You had to be on the beach all day, waiting for them to tell you when you were going to go in. And it was when the tide was very high, when there were very few waves, or it was very low, when there was just foam. That way you couldn’t prove anything.” Eizaguirre competed between 1981 — in 1987 she came seventh in the European championship — and 1991, when her first son was already a year old: “It was a championship in Getaria and I won. I was super satisfied and I didn’t enter any more, I devoted myself to my surf shop.”

By then, after a long period in which women in surfing were limited to friends and sisters, things had changed, but there was still a long way to go. Myriam Imaz — who, together with Estitxu Estremo, was the first Spanish female surfer to make the step up to the professional circuit — has never felt “bad in the water; always like just one more” surfer, but she remembers herself feeling permanently alone, the only woman among the surfers of Zarautz back in the 1990s.

At 15, her coach on the soccer team forced her to choose between that and surfing. It was 1995 and she went for the aquatic option. In a career spanning just over 15 years, she was Basque champion several years in a row, champion of Spain, and a junior runner-up in Europe. In 2018, already with the three children to whom she dedicates a large part of her days, she began to collaborate with the Emakumea Surflari project. She explains it like this: “Surfing here is an excuse to bring together different types of women, each with their own story, to connect with the sea and create a safe, trusting environment.”

Regarding the current era in surfing, Imaz seems to have a bittersweet feeling, because while the grassroots sport is expanding, taking a step further — from hobby to professional dedication — is much more difficult, especially if you are a woman. “Right now, there are women who should have their lives resolved materially because they have reached the top, but that is not the case.” She talks of a world conditioned by image, hand-in-hand with social networks, which she does not like. One in which competitions seem to be a starting point to obtain sponsorships that are what really allow people to dedicate themselves professionally to surfing. “It’s very difficult to be able to make a living from this even though now, being an Olympian, there is more help from the government. And I also understand the brands. I try to keep my networks as active as possible, but showing only what I like to do and nothing about what I don’t like,” adds Erostarbe.

This dictatorship of image distorts almost every area of life today, but probably even more so in women’s sport. In any case, at least in the field of surfing, its fans seem to easily distinguish the influencers from those who are really good at surfing. Frenchwoman Maud Le Car, 32, won many tournaments before switching to free-surfing; now she is chasing giant waves around the world. The last one she caught, at the end of January, was a 10-meter high one on the famous Belharra reef, opposite Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the French Basque Country. The images are spectacular, overwhelming.

Shortly afterwards, sitting in a café on La Grande Plage in Biarritz, she answers a question that she does not seem to like very much about what really makes a surfer stand out and attract the attention of sponsors: an image, a personality, a life story, a certain ability to inspire others? “The first thing is surfing. You have to be good at it. What inspires me about a surfer is their way of surfing. Then, if you like their personality, all the better, of course, but the important thing is surfing.” Next to her, Lee-Ann Curren, a 35-year-old surfer and musician, daughter of a legend of the sport, Tom Curren, adds: “When you dedicate yourself to this sport, just like with music or dance, it is through it that you show your personality, in how you do a turn, how you take a big wave…”

Both agree that things have improved for women, in terms of prizes — for the last five years, prizes at the main world championships have been equal to those of men — contracts, and recognition. Although they admit that they still sometimes find themselves in unpleasant situations, often being the only women in the water, especially in winter. “You can’t generalize, but sometimes men don’t behave well, there is sexism and they are bothered by a girl catching the waves, especially when they are not very good at it,” says Le Car, who runs the Save the Mermaid NGO for ocean protection. Both she and Curren still feel very alone on many occasions.

Of course, in Zarautz, the diversity that can be seen on the beach throughout the day is confirmed by the data from the Shelter surf school, which has 57 men and 99 women enrolled in its programs this winter. A difference that is more noticeable in the adult groups than in the younger ones, with more and more women deciding to try for the first time something they have been watching all their lives without daring to take the plunge.

“I don’t know, it just didn’t occur to me, it was a man’s thing,” says Oihana Iribar, the director of the Shelter school, who tried surfing for the first time three years ago, at the age 40. Perhaps women have gradually lost that feeling of embarrassment that they repeatedly told Sonia Ziani about when she suggested they give it a go. “They asked me, how many girls are there in the group? And I said: what does it matter, do you feel like it or not? It’s an education that we have to change,” she says.

“For me, I think it’s about stopping chasing the approval of men in everything you do,” Curren agrees from the other side of the border. And Le Car, who has just explained how, shortly before facing the big wave at Belharra last month, she received messages from people telling her that she wouldn’t be able to do it, agrees. “They said that, weighing 110 pounds, with these little legs, how could I do it? I just didn’t listen to them.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition