It’s not often that you hear about perfect surf in Uruguay. With neighboring countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Chile accounting for 19,000 kilometers of South America’s 25,000 km of coastline, there isn’t much to go around for other countries on the continent. For comparison, Uruguay’s coastline is only 661 km long, very little of which is actually surfable. However, when the conditions align, the surf there can get as good as anywhere in the world, as evidenced by Santiago Medeiro‘s dreamy tube above.
“Usually Uruguay gets the best swells during autumn and winter,” filmer Sebastian Calandra said over email. “But this last summer was one of the best, if not the best, in the last couple of decades. Waves didn’t give us a break and true ‘wave season’ is just starting.”
Surfing in Uruguay has been around since the 1970s, but the past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the sport, and as a matter of fact, the current Uruguayan President, Luis Lacalle Pou is himself a surfer, and is a certified ripper even though he’s not on the CT (probably because he’s got better things to do, you know, like running a country or whatever).
