Mundaka is a fishing village located in the province of Bizkaia, in the autonomous
community of Basque Country, in the North of Spain. At the mouth of the river Urdaibai
or Guernica, the village lays on the western coatline.
A small fishing village with a small port, Mundaka turned into an important touristic
centre due to its unique wave that brought surfers from all over the world.
Until now Mundaka, northeast of Bilbao, was one of the world’s 10 best surf spots,
famous for the powerful and up to 200 feet long tunnel wave which broke at the mouth
of the Guernica Estuary, the gateway to the Unesco-declared Urdaibai biosphere reserve.
For many years, the village has lodged international surfers who come to ride the
famous wave, but in August 2005 the 10,000 or so enthusiasts and their
entourage that usually throng the village did not show up.
The organisers of the 2005 Billabong Pro World Championship Tour announced the
cancellation of the annual surf event scheduled for October at Mundaka
following analysis of a sandbar that had generated the wonder wave.
“It would be like holding a world cup final on a dirt pitch,” said Craig Sage,
an Australian now living in Mundaka, who is a former director of the WCT event
and who helped put Europe on the international surf map.
According to Sage – now Billabong’s sales manager in Spain – who runs a surf shop,
together with the Mundaka Surf Taldea (Mundaka Surf Club), the dredging in 2003
of more than 243,000 cubic metres of sand from the Guernica Estuary and the creation
of new dunes on a beach on the opposite side of the river where the wave breaks has
resulted in a serious deterioration of the wave.
It was a local shipyard located along the river that originally carried out the dredging
operation to increase the draught of the estuary to enable ships to sail out to sea.
The operation provoked the erosion of the sandbar on the river bed where the wave broke
and changed the direction of the river flow and currents in the estuary.

The loss of Europe’s leading surf wave in Mundaka, a tiny Basque village of fewer
than 2000 inhabitants, and the subsequent cancellation of a World Championship Tour
(WCT) event has prompted anger from locals and surfers who remain perplexed about how
a shipyard’s massive sand dredging works have affected the Urdaibai reserve.