The Story of Chicama, Peru
Chicama is surfing’s great argument for patience: a left that peels along nearly four kilometers of Peruvian desert point, section after named section, from a cape with an islet off its tip to a sugar-trade pier in a fishing town of five thousand people. It was spotted from an airplane window, named after the wrong valley, and became the first wave on Earth protected by national law.
Four Kilometers of Left
Long-period southwest groundswell arrives here running almost parallel to the coast, wraps the diamond-shaped desert headland, and peels instead of closing out — down Malpaso at the cape, through the Keys, along the kilometer-long wall of El Point and the inside runners of El Hombre, to the pier at Puerto Malabrigo. On six-foot-plus swells the sections connect into rides of two kilometers and more, long enough to make legs cramp and history: the season runs April through October, the headland grooms the wind essentially all day, and the cold Humboldt Current keeps wetsuits on at seven degrees south. The price of all that length is the current sweeping down the point — ride it, then walk half an hour back up, or flag the zodiac surf taxi.
The Airplane Window
As the story goes, Hawaiian surfer Chuck Shipman saw the lines wrapping this cape from a commercial airliner window in the mid-1960s, matched the headland to a map, and wrote to surfing friends in Peru urging them to find it. Peru was already a surfing nation — it had hosted the 1965 World Championships at Punta Rocas, won by Peruvian Felipe Pomar — and in 1966 an expedition led by Carlos “Flaco” Barreda drove north and rode the wave first. The name stuck from Shipman’s map-reading: the point actually belongs to Puerto Malabrigo, but “Chicama,” the sugar valley to the south, had the better ring. The town still runs on its old rhythms — the pier was built in the 1910s for the sugar trade, mototaxis rattle past cevicherías, and the surf lodges on the bluff look straight down the point.
The First Protected Wave
Chicama’s greatest ride may be legal: Peru passed the Ley de Rompientes — the world’s first national law protecting surf breaks — in 2000, gave it teeth with regulations in 2013, and on February 18, 2016 Chicama became the first wave on Earth formally registered under it, a Guinness-certified world first that dozens of Peruvian waves have since followed. The wave keeps earning the paperwork: in August 2012, Cristóbal de Col fit a Guinness-record 34 turns into a single two-minute-twenty-second ride here. Getting there is simple by world-class-wave standards — about an hour and a half by road from Trujillo’s airport, through Paiján and out into the desert, where a left that never seems to end peels toward a town named after somewhere else.