The Nuquí surf guide

Welcome to Nuquí

Surfing in Nuquí

Nuquí is on the Chocó coast, which is rainforest running straight into the Pacific with no road connecting it to the rest of Colombia. You arrive by light aircraft from Medellín, and that single fact explains everything else about the place.

• 2spots

Two waves are documented. Nuquí itself is a left point at a river mouth, best at high tide, reliable, and very rarely crowded. Pico de Loro is a reef twenty minutes down the coast, very consistent, uncrowded even when it works, and hard: five out of ten on the same scale that gives Zicatela five.

There is no beginner wave in this entry, and none has been left out by accident. Both breaks name rocks, both sit on a coast where the nearest hospital is a flight away, and Chocó is somewhere to go already surfing. Somebody learning is better served almost anywhere else in Latin America.

The seasons are two. March is when Pico de Loro peaks, at sixteen clean days out of thirty. June is Nuquí's month, and its numbers are honest about what that means: two clean days out of thirty and twenty-seven too small. This is a coast of rain and quiet water more often than it is a coast of waves, and the humpback whales that arrive between July and October are, for most visitors, the better reason to be here.

Welcome home.

Explore Nuquí

• 2 spotsSurf spotsThe waves worth the trip
• Seasonal guideWhen to goMonth by month
• PracticalGetting thereFlights and transfers