Arica.

Arica is the northernmost city in Chile, ~18 km south of the Peruvian border and pinned between the Atacama Desert and the Pacific. The headline is El Gringo, a shallow left reef breaking right under the 139 m cliff of El Morro, the city’s headland. Locals call it the Chilean Pipeline. El Buey is the outer big-wave reef ~700 m offshore from Playa El Laucho, with rides past 180 m and the heft to hold properly at size. The 2007 WCT Rip Curl Pro Search ran here, and Andy Irons won the final at El Gringo.

April through August is the heart of the season, when Southern Ocean lows fire south-west swell straight at the coast. October and November see a second window. Arica is one of the wave-richest stretches of South America because there’s no continental shelf to drag the energy down. El Buey starts breaking around 2.5 m and holds 6 to 7 m on the heaviest paddled days. El Gringo wants smaller, cleaner pulses. The prevailing wind is south to south-east, offshore at the headland breaks. Arica gets 0.76 mm of rain a year, the driest inhabited city on earth, so the surface stays clean week after week.

Water sits at 14 to 20 °C, cold from the Humboldt Current. A 3/2 covers the year, a 4/3 in winter. The honest hazard is El Gringo’s reef. It’s a flat shelf of rock under no water with urchins everywhere, and even the 2007 WCT field struggled with the takeoff. This is not a beginner zone. Las Machas and Chinchorro, the long city beaches, are where to go for soft-day surf or learning. Big Pacific lefts under a desert sky in the same session is the local trade.