Mundaka

Where it sits. Mundaka is a village of about 1,900 people on the western lip of the Urdaibai estuary, where the Oka river empties into the Bay of Biscay some 35 kilometres northeast of Bilbao and three kilometres south of Bermeo. The old core is a tight grid of whitewashed houses on a low bluff above a small harbour, with the sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria and its Renaissance porch at the top and the tiny hermitage of Santa Katalina on the point below. Across the water lie the sandbanks and the long beaches of Laida and Laga. It is an ordinary and rather beautiful Basque coastal village that happens to sit beside one of the best waves in Europe.

The wave. Mundaka's left-hander breaks over a sandbar formed where the outgoing Oka meets incoming Atlantic swell. When conditions align — a solid northwest groundswell, an offshore southerly wind, a dropping tide — the wave stands up at the river mouth and peels for as much as four hundred metres in a near-continuous barrel, one of the longest rideable lefts in the northern hemisphere. It is fast, shallow over the bar at low water, and unforgiving of hesitation; the paddle-out is normally avoided altogether in favour of the small boat that ferries surfers from the harbour to the peak for a few euros. The season runs from September to March, and on the best days the line-up holds a hundred people and a rigid, locally enforced order of priority.

A wave that can be broken. The bar is a natural feature and therefore a fragile one. Dredging in the estuary in the early 2000s, undertaken to serve a shipyard upriver, altered the sand supply, and by 2005 the wave had degraded so badly that the professional world-tour event scheduled at Mundaka was cancelled outright — an unprecedented step, and a national news story in Spain. The sandbank re-formed over the following two winters and the contest returned in 2006 and 2007 before leaving the tour calendar. The episode is worth knowing because it explains local attitudes: the surf community here treats the estuary's sediment as infrastructure, and any proposal that touches the riverbed is met with organised opposition.

An older claim to importance. Mundaka's founding legend has a Scottish princess landing here and giving birth to Jaun Zuria, the mythical first lord of Biscay — a story with no documentary basis and a long life in Basque folklore. What is recorded is that the village held its own charter from 1379, that it disputed precedence with Bermeo for centuries, and that its captains sailed with the whaling and cod fleets working the Newfoundland banks from the sixteenth century onward. The Santa Katalina hermitage on the point, rebuilt in the eighteenth century and now flanked by a small light, marks where those crews were seen off and welcomed home.

Beyond the surf. Mundaka sits inside the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, and most of what surrounds it is protected. The estuary's tidal flats and reedbeds host wintering waders and a heavy spring and autumn passage of migrants; the Urdaibai Bird Center at Gautegiz Arteaga, twenty minutes away, has hides and telescopes trained on the marsh. A small passenger ferry crosses from Mundaka to Laida beach in summer, saving a long road detour around the head of the estuary, and the coastal path north to Bermeo and the cliff walk to the Santa Katalina lighthouse are both short and rewarding. The village's Portuondo headland, just south, holds a well-known campsite and a view straight down the estuary mouth.

Eating and staying. For a village this small the food is disproportionately good. The harbour front runs to grilled fish, spider crab and txakoli, and a handful of restaurants take the estuary's shellfish seriously enough to be worth a detour from Bilbao. Accommodation is limited — a few small hotels, guesthouses and the campsite — and it is fully booked through August and on any weekend when a swell is forecast in autumn. Prices in the village are higher than in nearby Bermeo, which remains the practical base for anyone travelling on a budget.

Getting there and timing. Euskotren line E4 from Bilbao to Bermeo stops in Mundaka after a run down the length of the Urdaibai estuary, taking a little over an hour and offering one of the better rail views on the Basque coast; the station is a five-minute walk from the harbour. Drivers take the BI-2235 through Gernika. Parking in the village is genuinely difficult from June onward. Surfers plan around the tide and the swell charts rather than the calendar, but for everyone else the estuary is at its best on a clear day between May and October, when the sandbanks emerge at low water as a pale delta and the whole reserve reads, from the Santa Katalina point, as a single continuous landscape from mountain to open sea.