Cape Town
The beach where South Africa learns, and the one city on this coast with a week's worth of evenings.
South Africa offers one of the longest surfable coastlines on earth, and a right-hander that appears on every list.
Jeffreys Bay is why many people come: a point that runs for hundreds of metres, at a standard few places reach. But reducing the country to J-Bay is a mistake. The Cape Peninsula, Durban and the Wild Coast offer entirely different conditions, and the country is crossed by car.
The season depends on which coast you want. The southern winter, June to September, feeds J-Bay and the Eastern Cape. Durban and the east coast work better in spring and autumn. Getting the season wrong costs more here than elsewhere, because the distances are long.
Water temperature swings hard: warm in Durban, genuinely cold in the Cape, where the Benguela current runs up the South Atlantic.
Who it suits: the experienced surfer coming for a specific wave, and the traveller who wants surf and a road trip in one. It is not a first-time destination, less for the size of the waves than for the logistics and the choices it forces.
Surf zones in South Africa
See all regionsDurban
Warm water all year on the Indian Ocean side, and the season that runs when the rest of the country is flat.
Jeffreys Bay
The right-hand point the whole surfing world knows, and a winter town that lives off it.