Clapo Surf Morocco

The camp

The house is four minutes on foot from both of Imsouane's beaches, which here means both of the village's waves. It sleeps fifteen and everything happens under the one roof: the meals, the games, the music, the evenings that run long. Frames all over the walls, plants in every corner, big wooden tables. The roof is the room you end up preferring, with the village below, the ocean in front, Cathedral breaking away across the water, and a mat rolled out at first light.

The Bay is the reason to come, and it is at the bottom of the street. Eight hundred metres of right-hand point over sand and rock, gentle enough to longboard on almost any day of the year, including the days the swell is too small to wake anything else on this coast. And when a north-west swell turns up with a north-east wind behind it, it becomes the longest right in Morocco. That is where the address earns its keep: from Taghazout or Tamraght the same wave costs you a trip booked the night before and over an hour of road each way. Here you walk out of the house. The currents that cross the bay do most of the paddling for you on the way back, which is why beginners last far longer in the water than they expect to. Cathedral, across the bay, is the shorter, faster, less forgiving version, and you go when it works and when you can hold your own.

Abderrahim, who everyone calls Clapo, is from Oualidia. He started at thirteen with no surf school in his town and promised himself he would open one. This is it. He still competes, so does his brother Houssine, and Anouar, who guides, is a certified lifeguard on top. Groups go out by level, five people to an instructor, they teach in Arabic, French and English, and a photographer follows the week, so there is something to look at in the evening.

Aïcha cooks everything, every day, the bread included. Lunch is light, salads and plates that will not sink you before the afternoon session; dinner is the whole thing, including the ones you will not find anywhere else because they only ever get made at home. Diets and allergies go in when you book. And Imsouane is quiet, markedly quieter than Taghazout or Tamraght and their bars that stay open late: the evening happens in the house, around this table and on this roof. When you do go out, you go to the port, where the places along the water grill whatever came off the boats that morning. If your criteria are the surf, the people you do it with, and the quiet, this is the right village.