The Battle Of Grotta del Saraceno

Wednesday, 3 July 2024

In the world of animal conservation one maxim holds true: Cute animals get all the charity.

Pandas, otters, gibbons, all get far more funds than less pleasing, but sometimes far more threatened, species of animals.

It’s gotten to the point that, earlier this year, WIRED published an article with the blunt title: ‘Stop saving cute animals’.

“One million species are at risk of extinction,” it stated, “but a handful of charismatic creatures get all the hype.”

It’s obvious why those creatures do. A cute animal makes the campaign director’s job easy. Look into those eyes, let your heart-strings be tugged, feel the emotive pull of connection. Now type in your numbers, it’s tax deductible.

During a recent flight of fancy I wondered if the same logic applies to surfspot conservation. Not that I have any experience with that, never worked for Save The Waves or Surfrider Foundation, yet I imagine the rationale is the same. Just swap ‘cute’ for ‘perfect’.

Maybe it’s a flawed analogy but the thought kept coming to me while reading about the surfers of Abruzzo, eastern Italy, and their local pointbreak – Grotta del Saraceno. It’s not a perfect wave, it’s not even consistent, and though Grotta has been surfed for thirty years it’s not listed on any surf maps or atlases.

Despite all of that, Grotta del Saraceno has fostered a tight-knit surfing community and they’re now fighting to save it.

With a cobblestone shoreline, waves breaking obliquely down the bay, and a whitewashed casa hidden in the groves, Grotta del Saraceno conjures a Southern California vibe (Photo Mario Trave)

The Adriatic Sea lies off the eastern coast of Italy, separating it from the Balkan Peninsula. “It’s the smallest sea in the world,” remarked Mario Trave, my Italian contact. A quick Google search debunks that statement – the Marmara Sea tops that little list – but it’s a statement that Mario repeats a few times, almost like a point of pride. Texans must confound him.

Nevertheless, the Adriatic Sea is small by many surfing standards, yet thanks to strong regional winds, namely the Sirocco from the south and the Jugo and Bora from the north, it gets enough swell to surf, and indeed it’s consistent enough to support many surfing communities.

“I can experience 60 to 70 days of surfing per year,” says Mario, “from dramatically poor to very good.”

“It’s never enough for us,” continues Mario, who’s 47-years old, “but it allows me to define myself, quite sincerely, a surfer.”

Owing to orientation, northerly winds can blow over 400kms of sea before reaching Grotta. Mario tells me that on the very best days the period can get up to ten seconds, size to six foot plus, with rides reaching 300 metres.

Despite Grotta’s inconsistency, the last Google Earth capture shows a sea of undulations along the Abruzzo coast, with lines of swell wrapping 90 degrees into the bay. The size is modest but the potential is clear.

With just enough exposure to northerly swell, and just enough protection from the prevailing northwest wind, not to mention its amphiteatre setting, Grotta is a marvel of the Adriatic (Google Earth)

Another thing the satellite capture shows is the issue that threatens the wave itself. At the southern end of the bay the beach is noticeably thinner. With a campground and well-to-do landowners seeing their beach vanish, a solution has been sought and it’s one Italians know very well.

Of Italy’s 7,500 kms of coastline, 7.5% of it, or 562 kms, is abutted by seawalls.

Many countries use breakwaters that jut perpendicular to the coastline to train river entrances or trap sand flow. Italy has those too, but what they also have, and have in great abundance, second only to Japan in fact, are parallel seawalls that block all swell from reaching the coast.

Japan builds them ostensibly to mitigate tsunami damage, though they’re not without criticism. A sea-faring nation now divided from the sea.

Italy has no threat from shifting tectonic plates and yet they build them anyway. There are some seawalls on the west coast, however the beaches of the east coast have copped the concrete treatment in extremis. Whole beaches, tens of kilometres long, denied natural processes, permanently stamped like the kerbs and gutters on the corso behind.

The practice even has a unique word – Riminization. Named after Rimini, a coastal resort town 300 kilometres north of Grotta, Riminization means “wild concreting or excessive tourist exploitation of a place with consequent environmental and landscape degradation.”

In large part it occurs due to the Italian practice of licensing out the beach to private operators who charge for day use and Riminization assures the sand stays in place. Of course, it also prevents sand from moving in natural longshore drift, causing sand shortfalls downstream.

The ‘Riminization’ of the Adriatic is worse than can be imagined. Wild coastline is rare and it’s shrinking further still (Google Earth)

Arguably, the seawalls aren’t the worst of it, at least from a surfing point of view, rather it’s the jutting breakwalls that block swell from the rocky corners where the swell runs sideways and the wind blows sideshore.

”During the last twenty years,” explains Mario, “at least five spots have been canceled forever from breakwaters.”

Now the threat of ‘cancellation’ has landed in Mario’s region. “€70 million in Euro funds has been approved only for Abruzzo,” says Mario, “while Marche and Molise, the areas north and south of Abruzzo are finding funds to do the same: build breakwaters.”

Another spot called Acquabella, thirty kilometres north of Grotta is also in potential danger of having a breakwall cut off swell, however it’s Grotta that’s feeling the heat. The Mayor of Abruzzo has budgeted €3.3 million to build the breakwall at Grotta, halt the erosion, and of course destroy the wave. 

Grotta under small conditions is still an enchanting corner.

Recently I read ‘A surfer in search of paradise’ by Basque surfer and author Indigo Urdinaga. Indigo’s ‘search’ is largely motivated by the destruction of his local break when authorities built a protruding breakwall at the mouth of the Oria River.

He and his friends called it the Putomoro – the Fucking Wall in English. “An ugly name, but its presence and reality are far uglier.”

“This was the place where we’d enjoyed the sea and the horizon, and now, there was the Putomoro, diverting the natural flow of the bay, pushing the sea away from the town, filling the area with cement, and turning the beach into an urbanized pit.”

“The paradise being sought by the backers of this indecent cement behemoth was worlds apart from the paradise we dreamt of.”

Later Indigo writes of travels abroad, to wild untouched coastlines that, in a bittersweet way, remind him of what was lost when the Putomoro was built. At Whangamata, New Zealand, where a long lefthander breaks down a rivermouth, he “felt like he was back in paradise, in the Orio of my childhood.”

“I gazed back towards the land while we waited for the set and saw the mouth of the Oria River. I felt joyful as I changed out of my wetsuit in the sun, but there was a lurking inward sadness to it at the same time.”

While reading Indigo’s book and also conversing with Mario, I tried to imagine the feeling of having my local surf spot destroyed. I don’t live in a surf town similar to, say, the Gold Coast, Byron Bay, or Torquay, but surfing still resonates through the community. There are people I recognise enough to have conversations with even though I don’t know their names. We’re brought together, this disparate bunch, largely by a long righthand pointbreak and a smattering of beachies.

Try as I might, I can’t imagine my life should that pointbreak be destroyed. Not even as a thought exercise. It’s a terrible, alien thought and I can’t adequately infuse it with the kind of reality Indigo once endured and Mario is currently threatened by.

The reason I struggle is that, here in Australia, surfing is more than simply an accepted pastime, it’s now part of the mainstream. For example, Shellharbour is thirty minutes south of where I live. It’s home to a number of Australia’s better slabs and reef breaks, and one of the best surfers at those waves is also the Mayor of Shellharbour. That’s not a carpark title, Chris Homer is the actual mayor, he wears the weird regalia when council sits, and he got in on a platform of saving a surf spot.

Grotta under a jumped up storm swell isn’t perfect but it’s eminently rippable (Photo Graziello Marino)

The surfers of Grotta weren’t informed of the plans to build a maledetto muro – an Italian version of The Fucking Wall. If they didn’t stumble across plans last September, the construction equipment would have rolled in without warning.

In response, they quickly formed a committee to strategise and defend Grotta, the first act being a paddle out to bring media attention to the project. It had the desired effect, the media attended, and in turn they pressed Francesco Menna, the Mayor of Vasto – a local government sub-region in Abruzzo – with questions.

“Surf can be done everywhere,” said Mayor Menna, displaying both ignorance of surfing and the Riminization of the Adriatic coast. “I will offer another beach to practice surfing.”

Those quotes are ridiculous to any surfer, Australian or Italian, and the mayor could perhaps be excused by a lack of knowledge, yet Mayor Menna displayed his contempt for surfers when he called them “sea squirrels.” It was said with derision, not humour, though the Mayor might hope that these cute animals don’t get all the charity as the squirrels have set up a crowdfunding campaign to take the battle to court.

On a wild, largely untouched stretch of Adriatic coast, Abruzzo surfers stood resolute against plans to breakwall the bay.

In a recent study by the Australian National University, lead researcher Dr Ana Mareno argued that governments “overlook the value of surfbreaks” and sees an opportunity for better policies and local coastal management plans.

“Surf breaks are valuable natural assets,”said Dr Mareno, “but waves only form under a very delicate set of conditions that can be easily altered by anything that we do to the coast.”

“Things like the construction of infrastructure, the expansion of a marina, can impact how waves form and how often they break.”

Maintaining natural places was not just a good thing to do at an environmental level, but in the study more than 94% of respondents reported surfing had a positive impact on their physical and mental wellbeing. Similarly, and importantly for the surfers of Abruzzo, the vast majority of respondents believed surfing helped foster a greater sense of connectedness to their community.

When Kirra was under threat, surfers far and wide gathered to protest the destruction of a miracle wave. Punta de Lobos in Chile is majestic and awe-inspiring, so when dubious development encroached, surfers rallied in opposition.

Grotta doesn’t fit that pattern. It isn’t perfect nor awe-inspiring – it’s not “one of those creatures that gets all the hype” – but to the surfers of Abruzzo, Grotta del Saraceno is the centre of their surfing orbit and that alone makes it a wave worth fighting for.