I know I said I’d meet you in Chicama but my rendezvous with a little town in the very north of Peru feels noteworthy.
Máncora is where the desert forgets itself and wanders into the sea. A place bleached by sun and pared back by salt, where life is edited down to its bare, workable nouns. Ocean. Wind. Beer. Shade. Everything else is surplus.
The morning light rises softly, the street still wrapped in its duvet, foals appear in the quebrada first – long legged and tentative – hovering in the pale gold before the day hardens. Horses gallop the beach as if rehearsing freedom and you paddle out to the base of the night from yesterday still going for some.
By late morning you begin to shed complexity. The heat insists on it. You become something reptilian. A lizard reborn. You lie flat, you move little, you absorb heat with intent. Time loosens its grip. The sun scratches rather than warms, the dust coats everything including your thoughts. Palm trees look ornamental, cactus look honest.
Life simplifies itself here. You own only what you don’t mind losing to the beach: sunscreen with sand permanently welded into the cap, a paperback swollen from sea air, sunglasses bought cheaply and treated accordingly, a towel that smells faintly of salt and yesterday. Anything more ambitious would be arrogant. There are overpriced matchas, poured with composure and cheap beers that require no explanation. Both are consumed in the same heat, both disappear quickly.
When I first rocked up to Máncora Beach, my main point of reference was a little green jersey. That’s Facundo.
When I was in the water, he was too and when I wasn’t in the water – when I was working, eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner, when I was fawning on the shore – he was still out there. This chat was, in fact, the first time I saw the kid on land. I briefly worried he might not survive it.
Máncora has plenty of good surfers and a healthy population of groms with ambition and sharp elbows. But Facundo stood out. Not because he’s Peru’s national champion, though he is, or that the name alone reads like a career trajectory: tour and maybe one day a world title. But because of how he holds himself in the lineup. He’s still having fun. Still chatting. Still helping out the young ones. Still making a good amount of room for beginners. No edges and no ego.
Despite the fact he surfed circles around me and that I managed to knock him on the head with my log once or twice, he was still down to chat.
Wherever you see the green jersey, not too far away there’s usually a red cap. That’s Coco – Facundo’s dad. Coach. Manager. Occasional stage mum. Their relationship became a minor obsession among my friends. We invented small disciplinary myths to entertain ourselves: Facu snakes one of Coco’s students and is promptly banished to the tiny right the beach sometimes produces, there to reflect on his moral failings. I guess we can thank his dad for the lack of ego.
But jokes aside, I’ve never seen a more family-orientated surf setup. Early mornings are for everyone – mums on shore with the dog snapping clips, Coco’s teaching a 28-year-old to catch waves for the first time and Facu’s ripping.
Facu thinks in surf. When I asked him what it’s like growing up as a surfer in Máncora, he didn’t hesitate.
“Bien,” he said. “They teach you how to read the waves and you learn to have really good style.”
Surf is the local language. People here enjoy watching how others surf, that it’s something noticed, something respected.
When I asked about barriers to surfing in Máncora, both he and Coco responded with perfect, unfiltered sincerity.
“Sometimes,” Facu said, “we’re not lucky…we don’t have waves for like a month.”
“And we never have rights,” Coco chimed.
I giggled, then asked about the barriers I’d actually meant – money, access, class.
“Yes,” Facu said. “It’s difficult to get money to travel to competitions.”
“And socially?” I asked.
“Not much,” Coco said. “Just difficult to find money here for that kind of experience.”
I asked about their favourite part of surfing in Máncora and Coco answered instantly.
“When the swell is perfect, the wave is amazing. It’s better than swimming pool waves.”
He’s not wrong. The week before, a summer swell rolled through and delivered 5ft perfect, barreling lefts – every day that week you woke up to birds singing and the justified hope of getting tubed.
Surfing, for Facundo, is everything: his present, his future, his proof of concept. But when I asked Coco what surfing meant to him, he paused.
“For me?” He looked momentarily surprised. “It’s my job,” then, after a pause, “and my passion too.”
He is Facu’s father first, coach second – though the border between the two is more theoretical than real. They argue sometimes, as all functional partnerships do. Coco remarked, “When [Facundo] surfs, he’s working too. He’s making his future.”
And on that note, I let the kid get back to work.
With the green jersey back in the water, Máncora’s cityscape returns to its normal state – one where dogs acquire names whether they want them or not. You call them something affectionate and they answer to it for a day, maybe two. Romance follows a similar pattern – brief, sunburnt, mildly disappointing, spoken of later with a half-smile and a shrug.
As the light thins and stretches, the ocean pulls itself back, leaving the beach momentarily exposed and quiet. When the water drains of little men in leotards, follow the base inland and you’ll find them under a hue of purple, the performance never ends. They move in small packs from beach to bar to club, fluorescing under cheap lights, still riding the day’s last swell. The sea has released them and the night claims them.
This is usually the moment to dodge. To step sideways from the almost-romance, the familiar script: a beer too many, a promise that sounds plausible in the dark, a goodbye that will not survive daylight. Máncora teaches you quickly what to keep and what to let wash back out – names of dogs, not people; mornings, not nights; the quiet competence of sun and salt over the noisy ambition of attachment.
Máncora doesn’t ask for devotion. It offers something rarer: permission to be unencumbered, lightly held together by sun, salt and the understanding that tomorrow will look much the same – and that this is precisely the point.
