In Portugal, a DIY longboarding festival is keeping surfing’s radical roots alive

Gliding Barnacles is often described as a homecoming. In the Portuguese coastal city of Figueira da Foz, a bouldered jetty has become a makeshift living room, lined by salt-licked sofas. Near one, a trio of bronzed girls in bikinis are spread out over the bare concrete, twisted around beer cans and a chessboard, gesticulating in French. While behind them, a hopeful dog grins on a sofa graffitied with ​“Reserved for Emotionally Available People”. Someone has abandoned one van trainer filled with sand. I look around to locate its owner, but of course nobody is wearing shoes – this is a surf festival. Instead of a TV, all the sofas are turned towards the roar of the Atlantic Ocean, eyes glued to the longboarders dancing through the waves.

Every September, Gliding Barnacles sweeps into the city’s southern Cabedelo beach, attracting an estimated 45,000 people. It’s the brainwave of a local group of surfers who are raising awareness of coastal erosion that threatens Figueira da Foz’s legendary waves. The story of the festival is a long one, warns Eurico Gonçalves, the iconic wire-haired surfer who has made it his life’s work. ​“While we are fighting, we cannot be serious all the time,” he says mischievously, ​“Gliding Barnacles came for the fun of it – the fun of the fight.”

It’s important to start with the wave that the festival is founded on. The Cabedelo beach is near the city’s old industrial dockyard zone immediately south of the Mondego estuary. The beach stretches out as a long fringe of sand, hidden under ocean mist in the mornings but a searing vision of gold come afternoon. Locals know it as the most consistent wave, easier going than its northern sister – the mythical Buarcos. Made up of three separate waves, Buarcos is famous for transforming into a rare white-tipped unicorn when conditions perfectly align, linking all three into Europe’s longest right-hand point break. 

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These waves are of surfing legend: Nunes Fernandes, who built what is recorded as the first European surfboard, was a pioneering local. In the 1960s, the controversial ​“Black Knight of surfing” Mickey Dora, hid out in these parts while on the run from the FBI. By the ​’70s, Figueira da Foz had become a key stop on the international surfer route. Australians and Americans curious about Buarcos, and challenged by the thought of it, would start their pilgrimage in places like Frankfurt, drive down through France and northern Spain, and stop on these beaches, staying from September until the first winter storms arrived in October or November. Gonçalves inherited these stories when he began to surf in the ​‘80s, and, excluding a stint studying law, which he believes would have made him a good lawyer, but still a boring lawyer, he went back to his beloved beach and has spent the last 30 years there instead.

When the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Notícias reported that the port’s existing northern breakwater was to have a further 400m extension back in 2007, to reduce sand accumulation and improve wave disturbance around the commercial quay, the residents of Figueira da Foz thought it a good thing. Recognising early on that the extension would disrupt the powerful Atlantic sand drift, which shifts one million cubic meters of sand annually, and inadvertently cause severe coastal erosion in specific beaches. Gonçalves tells me that he was horrified: ​“Apart from surfers and fishermen, we realised nobody cared about the waves.” Despite their warnings, the construction went ahead regardless. 

Portugal is shaped by the Atlantic, and its coastal communities have evolved alongside its mercurial moods, learning to read the omens hidden between the sets. ​“For hundreds of years, there have been thousands of books about the sea as our enemy,” Gonçalves explains, of crashing waters that have swallowed fishermen whole. Along the Portuguese coast, waves have been recorded at 26m overhead, and there are few words to describe the awe of a body of water, a rippling crest higher than a nine-storey building, slowly coming to life with an ancient roar – alive and hungry. “[Big wave surfing proving ground] Nazaré was a place of death. Everyone had lost a relative, a father, a brother, a grandfather to the ocean.”

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SOS Cabedelo, a political and environmental movement, began in earnest in 2009, gathered from members of the local surf scene. The campaign repeatedly warned public authorities about the damage the breakwater extension would cause, and in September that year, brought 230 surfers into the ocean to protest with a giant human ​“SOS”. ​“It was the whole community,” Gonçalves explains. ​“I just rang the bell first – and so Miguel and I got the cross to carry.” Led by fellow campaigner, architect Miguel Figueira, one of his ​“best friends, a brilliant architect and brilliant mind”, the group demanded an economic study exploring a permanent sand bypass that would transfer sand trapped north of the harbour’s breakwater to the eroding beaches south of it, modelled on similar Australian systems. ​“Miguel told me at the beginning that it would probably take 20 years and at the time, I did not understand it,” explains Eurico. ​“But as a beach bum, I do not have much to do except wait.”

The first official Gliding Barnacles started with 11 surfers, 12 people from the organisation, plus a handful of bands and artists, in 2014. When American pro Garret McNamara conquered the Nazaré wave three years earlier and showed the Portuguese public a wave could be an opportunity – a plan hatched in Gonçalves’ mind. ​“We thought, let us choose people we like, longboarders who are artists, artists who are longboarders, musicians too,” he says. They sent lots of invitations in the first year, with international surfers American Mike Perry and Italian Matteo Fabri turning up. The rest of the motley crowd were local to Figueira da Foz. 

As one of the youngest members in attendance, Teresa Folhadela remembers these as the ​“garage days”. ​“Even though it sounds a bit erotic, it was kind of a men’s club – a surfers’ club,” she explains, giggling. ​“It was a group of friends who did this festival in the beginning, and it was literally a garage.” The Lisbon-based documentary maker works at FuelTV in Lisbon, but grew up just 20 minutes from Buarcos, surfing at dawn with her dad and sunset with her mum, members of the early scene who taught her to love the waves as much as they did. ​“I don’t remember meeting Eurico because I feel like I’ve always known him,” she says of the local legend, ​“but I do remember being a kid, being super small, and walking into this room where everything was super dark, everyone was wearing leather jackets and playing super heavy punk music, and I was a little bit overwhelmed and thinking, ​‘Wow, these guys are so cool and so scary.’”

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She is one of the special few to have made it to every edition, growing up alongside it from a nascent underground movement to a five-day party that celebrates longboarding as an art form. This year, around 250 people were involved in making it happen: Surfers, men and women, in one-hour expression sessions rather than conventional scored heats. Across the five days, a crowd watches from the long pier: mop-haired surfers swooping and cruising over the waves, on a single-fin longboard without a leash in an ode to surfing’s early days; or women tiptoeing to the front of the board, and back again, before voluntarily kamikaze-ing off the board into the white water. Invited for their style and energy, competition between surfers is avoided as it maintains hierarchy, and that is just not what Gliding Barnacles is about. 

Here surfing is not just a sport, but a culture that has its roots in music, as it does in artistry, tattooing, fashion and booze – and specifically, for Gonçalves, Portuguese wines. The old port hangar was once again transformed into a sprawling exhibition space, where artists of all persuasions are drawing on walls or erecting large-scale installations or spray-painting unidentifiable objects. Shapers sand and sweat over boards; nearby, a large big-top circus tent blasts punk and rock music until late. ​“I’ve watched the festival grow and grow, but it still preserves the same spirit and the same thing that got us here in the first place,” Folhadela says. ​“That’s pretty magical.”

She continues: ​“There’s this feeling of love in the air and this sense of.. I don’t know how to explain it. I think it’s really no ego, you know?” She says she talks to more people at Gliding Barnacles than she does in the entire year, making friends from the crowd spun from over 40 different countries. If the small port city didn’t have much in the way of cultural attractions before 2014, it does now. ​“From the point of view of someone who actually grew up and spent all my life there, it has made Figueira do Foz super exciting,“ she says, ​“Gliding has made it a point on the map.”

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When I first reached out to Beau DiFiore, he was attempting to board an 11-hour flight from LAX. A shaper at Mollusk surf shop in Santa Barbara, he had heard about the ​“fest” first from a customer in California, and upon arriving for the first time last year, he promptly discovered it was a ​“force of joy”.

Beau maintains there is nothing like Gliding Barnacles, which miraculously remains independent of sponsorship and free for a daytime pass. He references the corporate presence in the World Surfing League, which in January 2024 announced the Lexus Pipe Pro and that the car manufacturer would partner at the Sunset Pro competitions, which expanded to include the US Open of Surfing and WSL Finals. A move which has been criticised as the sport becomes more exclusive, and the DIY culture and community of surfing takes a hit. ​“I feel these huge corporate companies that don’t have any interest in surfing, he says, ​“and because the intention is not there, it’s not created more opportunities.”

“The intentions of the Gliding Barnacles are so pure that you can feel that when you’re there,” he says, ​“I think it’s one of those things where it’s got this crazy ripple effect. Where it’s like the event itself is a huge rock that someone’s dropping in this crystal-clear pool of water, and it’s just a massive boulder, and someone’s dropping it from a bridge. And then every year it just, like – the rock gets bigger and bigger, and the ripples just get bigger and bigger, and the effect that it has on the rest of surfing is just exponential.” 

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As for Cabedelo, the wave continues to miraculously bring the best conditions in time for the festival, perhaps to show its gratitude. After more than a decade of advocacy and struggle, the Portuguese government finally acknowledged what the SOS Cabedelo movement had advocated for all along. In 2025, it announced it would commit to the design and construction of the fixed sediment bypass system, a permanent pumping system, that draws up sand through a pipeline beneath the bed of the Mondego, suctioning sediment across the harbour entrance and avoiding erosion across vulnerable beaches, with an investment of €18.1 million (£15.3m). But there’s a difference between approval and action. ​“Public opinion is now all on our side, but we just need the political decision,” Gonçalves says with a quiet clarity that comes after the storm. ​“We are going to do it; we are going to win.” 

Ellie Howard is a freelance journalist based in Lisbon. Follow her on Instagram.

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