Mention Lebanon, and most people think of two things: its food, and its political instability. Surfing rarely comes up. But last year, a team of four Lebanese men competed at the Asian Surfing Championship, chasing qualifying spots for this year’s Asian Games. It was a sign that Lebanon’s Mediterranean coastline is beginning to harvest a small surf culture, which is still in its infancy.
Chris Dirany didn’t grow up surfing. Born and raised in the mountain town of Zahle, an hour and a half hour from the coast, he started skiing with his dad at five, and picked up snowboarding and skateboarding a few years later. He caught his first wave at 17. Five years after that, he was teaching the sport to others and this September, he’ll be one of two surfers representing Lebanon at the Asian Games. But surfing in Lebanon doesn’t exist outside of the country’s broader struggles. “We have a hard situation here in Lebanon because of the war and everything that’s happening,” said Chris, speaking from a café near a military base with helicopters circling overhead. “Surfing isn’t a priority for some people – there are a lot of problems, and people are losing their homes. It’s not a priority, but it’s definitely an escape. The community is growing, but under hard conditions.”
Surfing in Lebanon is still young, barely 15 years old, by most accounts. The country’s most popular break, in the south, is named Mustafa’s A-Frame, after a local surfer who is nearly blind but was among the first in the area to surf and own a board. It was Ali Elamine, now president of the Lebanese Surfing Federation, who discovered the spot between 2010 and 2013 and gave it real momentum. “He’s the pioneer of surfing in Lebanon,” said Chris. “He actually taught the boys over there how to surf. He taught me how to surf, ten years ago.”
Access to surfing in Lebanon looks a little different depending on where you’re from. Locals who live near the break get an easier start – no travel, no cost to get to the water. But for everyone, the real cost is usually the gear. The country currently has only one local shaper, Paul Abbas; anything else has to be ordered from abroad, at roughly double the price. “Affording boards and keeping up with surfing accessibility is kind of the problem,” said Chris. More people are picking up the sport now, but staying with it takes time, and the means to afford it.
Even within Lebanon, surfing is still met with surprise. “Oh, we have waves in Lebanon? I didn’t know that,” is the reaction Chris said he’s been getting for the past ten years, though it’s started to shift. In towns like Jiyeh, where people actually see surfers in the water regularly, the sport has become familiar. Everywhere else, it’s still mostly unknown. That’s partly because the map itself is small. Beyond Mustafa’s A-Frame in the south, the north has its own spots too — a beach break in Jbeil, where Board ‘n’ Surf teaches beginners, and another in Jiyeh, home to Surf Lebanon. Batroun holds a further spot along the coast. A handful of other breaks are scattered along the coastline too, but most only come alive under specific storm systems or swell angles, inconsistent enough that locals don’t talk about them much. For a country with roughly 130 miles of coastline, the actual surfable map is short, and everyone in the community more or less knows it by heart.
Despite the growing interest, the surf community is still small enough that everyone mostly knows everyone. Chris estimates there are somewhere between 70 and 100 dedicated surfers in the country, spread across the north and south. But that number rarely grows in a straight line, for every person who joins the community, someone else tends to leave the country entirely, chasing work or stability elsewhere. On a good summer’s day, with waist-high waves, the lineup might hold around 30 people. But in winter, when the swell actually gets serious, that number drops to four or five. It’s a level of solitude Chris said is almost unheard of elsewhere – a nearly empty lineup, in conditions most surfers would call firing. It’s one of the rare upsides of surfing somewhere so few people do: when the waves are actually good, there’s no one to share them with.
That solitude cuts across gender lines too, women are still a small part of the surf community. Chris counts only three or four who surf consistently, on every swell; many others left the sport, or the country, in recent years. But he’s noticed a shift among beginners: more girls are showing up to lessons than before, a trend he hopes keeps building. “I always push women and girls to surf more in Lebanon,” he said, especially in lineups where the ratio can be as lopsided as 20 men to one woman. “Ladies first, always.”
Looking ahead, Chris is optimistic, cautiously. He thinks their run at the championship could shift how people at home see the sport. “People in Lebanon should feel a little bit excited to work more and to actually try to surf better,” he said. He also expects outside perception to shift alongside it, competing on that stage, he said, tends to earn a community more respect than it gets surfing quietly at home.
But Chris is careful not to overpromise. Progress here doesn’t move in a straight line. “It depends as well on the world,” he said, trailing off, a reference to the same instability that shapes nearly everything else about surfing in Lebanon. Training, traveling, competing: none of it happens in a vacuum. Still, he’s certain about the trajectory, even if the pace isn’t guaranteed. “If everything calms down in Lebanon,” he said, “the surfing is going to get better.”
And even so, Lebanon’s surf scene may still be small, it hasn’t gone unnoticed. WSL commentator Strider Wasilewski has surfed Jiyeh; French-Lebanese surfer Adrien Toyon filmed a short part along the northern coast; and Spanish surfing veteran Kepa Acero covered the south coast of the country. For a community built largely from scratch, on a coastline most people don’t associate with the sport at all, that kind of quiet recognition might be the clearest sign yet of where it’s headed.
