In preparation for Argentina, I texted a friend for recommendations. He replied with: “Go to Brazil.” It was the only remotely unpatriotic thing I heard an Argentine say for the next two months.
If anything, it made me more determined to arrive in the middle of winter. I’ve always preferred places slightly out of season, when they’re stripped of their best angles and forced to rely on personality. Summer is easy. Every place can flirt when it’s tanned, drunk, and spilling onto the pavement. Winter is when you find out if there’s anything worth talking to after last orders.
There’s something deeply satisfying about arriving when everyone else has decided not to. You spend less time searching for a park, dealing with arrogant city siders, and more time finding the small, stubborn pleasures that survive bad weather and empty streets. Little nuggets of gold that only seem to reveal themselves once the crowds have gone home. And then, there is the added satisfaction of feeling superior to those people.
I’d had Chapadmalal on my radar for a while, and you can’t really know Chapadmalal without knowing AFT. It sits on a hill above a lonely break that crashes against cliffs rising straight out of the Atlantic. AFT stands for Amantes del Fin de Tarde (“Lovers of the Late Afternoon”), a name born on the beaches of southern Mar del Plata where, on the first day of summer, the sun sets almost perfectly parallel to the coastline, turning the ocean bright orange.
I managed to catch one of its founders, Pepe, though he’d sensibly traded the Argentine winter for Indonesia. He assured me though that I was in the right place before passing me on to a few local friends.
AFT is one of those projects that could only come from a small town. I had a friend come down from Buenos Aires while I was here, and she kept asking, “What do you actually do?” Nothing, really. I check the surf, a task that could take five minutes or two hours, stretch out in the rare patches of winter sun, scribble in a notebook, strum a guitar, and occasionally have surprisingly philosophical conversations with the dog on the corner. Small-town life is, on paper, a lot of nothing. The trick is learning that “nothing” can be surprisingly full.
AFT came from exactly that. “AFT was simply a group of friends who shared a love of art, surfing and music,” Pepe told me. “After surf sessions we’d gather at Pedro’s (the other half of AFT) and talk about how we could build a life that allowed us to surf more and make a living from it. We’d put on live music, offer free beer, and sell Pedro’s artwork. That funded our little adventure.”
At its core, though, the idea never became any more complicated than that. “AFT was simply a way to help us surf more,” Pepe told me.
It’s an ambition most surfers quietly carry: finding work that revolves around the ocean rather than stealing hours from it. There were periods when AFT had to sacrifice surf time to grow, Pepe admitted, but they’ve found a rhythm. “Today we’ve found the right balance. The amount of time we spend surfing each year is perfectly matched by the amount of time we spend working.”
That balance feels inseparable from Chapadmalal itself. “Ever since I was a kid,” Pepe said, “Chapadmalal represented something wild, cold, and blessed with great waves. The people who grew up there and surf there still carry that identity with them.”
Pepe wasn’t wrong. On my first day with Santi, the local entrusted with looking after me, was also the first day of the season whales passed by. A nugget of gold, I’d say.
The morning had been all drizzle and grey skies until Santi pulled up in a blue ford ute that was old enough to qualify as family history. As it drove across the coast it split open the clouds and painted the sky blue too. The suspension had long since retired, every bump threatening mild concussion, but the smell of sun-baked vinyl and petrol transported me straight back to childhood. Whether it was nostalgia or the fumes, I arrived at the beach feeling pleasantly detached from reality.
The wave breaks opposite a huge abandoned hotel that, before Santi explained it, I’d assumed was a prison. Which, in fairness, would be particularly cruel, forcing inmates to stare at perfectly groomed lines peeling down the point all day.
About half an hour into the surf, the sun finally decided to show up. Santi had promised it’d be a classic late-afternoon session, and suddenly it was glassy enough to believe him. Another nugget of gold. It felt as though summer was sitting just beyond the horizon, teasing everyone. That’s another joy of arriving somewhere in winter: sunshine becomes an event. The entire town seemed to drop what they were doing and run to the beach. People cartwheeled across the sand, tripped over themselves pulling on wetsuits and skipped through the car park with boards tucked under their arms.
Later that evening Santi took me to the local club for the annual Truco tournament. It was all folding tables, plastic chairs, velvet curtains and a DIY hamburger station, washed down with Fernet in plastic cups. The room contained every version of a small town: young families, freshly turned 18-year-old’s, old surfing buddies, and the bloke who’d clearly moved away but returned most weekends to remind everyone he’d made it to the big city. Santi seemed determined to introduce me to each of them as “my Australian friend… she’s a journalist.” By about the second introduction I felt like a prize pig with wildly inflated credentials.
I had absolutely no idea how to play Truco, the whole reason everyone had gathered, and the joint I’d smoked in the car park had rendered learning almost impossible as well removing any conversational abilities I once had. Fortunately, observation is journalism’s oldest trick. It was also, that night, my only surviving skill.
After a couple weeks in Chapa, I started to understand what Pepe meant when he described its surf culture as “a mix of fascinating characters.” There are the locals who’ve always lived here, the people who moved more than twenty years ago, many of whom still play an important role in keeping the lineup respectful and passing that culture on, and the latest recruits escaping cities in search of a slower life by the sea. Winter pares the town back to its essentials, but that’s when those different tribes seem to knit together, sharing waves, stories and the occasional favour until summer returns.
While I was busy collecting nuggets of gold in an Argentine winter, Pepe was in Indonesia where the latest chapter of AFT has led. To him, Bali and Chapadmalal aren’t as different as they first appear. They’re both places “where people come to dream, find inspiration, connect with the ocean, and experience the energy that surf destinations naturally have.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned, “Being here during wave season means I sometimes surf eighteen days in a row.”
Thanks, mate.
I was pulling on enough neoprene to survive an Antarctic expedition while he was clocking up nearly three weeks of tropical surf. There are some details you can keep to yourself.
Maybe the people are what makes AFT feels so inseparable from Chapadmalal. On paper it’s a brand, a boutique hotel and a creative project. In reality it’s about paying attention to places that reveal themselves slowly and, as Pepe puts it, creating “more opportunities to surf.” I came looking for Argentina in its least flattering season, expecting empty beaches and grey skies. Instead, I found late-afternoon sessions that felt borrowed from summer, community halls full of strangers, and a town that celebrated every sliver of sunshine like it had won the lottery. It turns out winter wasn’t Chapadmalal’s worst season after all. It was where all the nuggets of gold were hiding.
