Photography: Alex Papis/alexpapis.com
From among 2.7 million websearches about surfing from September 2013 to the current day, 201 thousand were focused on Portugal, which makes it the most online searched country concerning the sport. This analysis comes from Bloom Consulting and the portuguese performance, which accounts for 7.3% of the global searches, is connected to the new promotional strategy from the Tourism of Portugal, which is betting heavily on surfing.
The data was released on Friday during the presentation of the documentary project McNamara Surf Trip, on the Carcavelos Beach. This initiative is the result of a partnership with the hawaiian big waves surfer Garrett McNamara, and consists of an exploration of Portugal’s best waves and tourist destinations. McNamara traveled through seven regions, from the north to the south and including the Madeira and Azores archipelagos, in an investment worth about 200 thousand euros.
“These results are the culmination of a promotion effort that started with Nazaré’s giant waves and Garrett McNamara, and continued with a series of initiatives that took Portugal to this position of being Europe’s main surfing destination”, mentioned João Cotrim de Figueiredo, the Tourism of Portugal President, through the Surf Portugal magazine.
This new promotional approach gets its strength through the online platform Portuguese Waves, which gathers all the relevant informations for the foreign surfers to discover the portuguese coast as good as possible. Besides these informative contents, videos and photo galleries of McNamara’s journey through Portugal are also available, turning this internet corner into a surfing spots guide of the portuguese coast.
Contributing to this database will also be present the international competitions held in Portugal, with emphasis on the Azores and Cascais Primes, the Men and Women’s World Tour stages and the Allianz ASP World Junior in Ericeira.
Esta publicação também está disponível em | This article is also available in: Portuguese (Portugal)
