Surfing Salaverry: Trujillo's historic port, in Peru

Salaverry is a working port, about fifteen kilometres south-east of Trujillo, Peru's third-largest city and the capital of the La Libertad region. It's roughly a twenty-minute drive from Trujillo airport, along the Pan-American Highway.

The port itself has a precise history: built after a scientific survey commissioned to Miguel Grau, who would later become Peru's greatest naval hero, it officially opened on 9 March 1870, named after General Felipe Santiago Salaverry. For decades it shipped sugar and cotton out of the haciendas of the nearby Moche and Chicama valleys to the rest of the country.

So this isn't a resort beach built for tourism, but a genuine working port, complete with docks, cranes and cargo traffic — a rawer setting than the beach towns further along the Peruvian coast, and part of what gives the spot its character.

Salaverry is an exposed spot, somewhere between a beach and a jetty break, breaking right by the port's installations. Swell pours in with little to block it, which makes it a consistent spot, working for a good part of the year.

The best combination pairs a south-southwest swell with an offshore wind from the north-east. Without that combination, the face tends to chop up faster than elsewhere on this stretch of coast, which is exposed to more or less every angle.

Conditions range from an approachable beach break to bigger, more serious days, which makes it a spot where both beginners and experienced surfers can, depending on the day, find something worth paddling out for — as long as you read the forecast carefully before heading over.

Two windows stand out, December to March and June to August, with swell that's broadly present year-round along this stretch of coast. It's the same South Pacific groundswell that feeds Chicama a little further north doing most of the work.

Unlike Lima, further south and therefore more exposed to the Humboldt Current, the water at Salaverry stays a touch milder: around 17-18°C on average. That's still cool water for the latitude, nowhere near the tropical standards people picture when they think of equatorial South America, but a notch warmer than Lima's Costa Verde.

A 3/2 mm wetsuit is still recommended year-round. Head further north still, towards Piura and Tumbes, and the water turns noticeably warmer, sometimes surfable in boardshorts even in the southern winter.

This stretch of coast isn't just a backdrop for Peruvian surfing history, it's one of its claimed cradles. The Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, religious and administrative capital of the Moche civilisation roughly between 100 and 900 CE, stand just a few kilometres from the port, on the edge of Trujillo. A little later, the Chimú built Chan Chan here, the largest adobe city in the Americas.

About twenty kilometres away, on the other side of Trujillo's bay, the fishermen of Huanchaco still ride caballitos de totora today — small woven-reed vessels used here for roughly 3,000 years according to archaeological research, and considered by some surf historians to be one of the earliest known forms of wave-riding. Huanchaco has, in fact, been a recognised World Surfing Reserve since 2013.

Salaverry isn't Huanchaco, but it shares the same coastline, the same southern swell, and the same Moche and Chimú hinterland: a way of surfing with, in the background, one of the oldest documented relationships to the wave anywhere on earth.

The main point of caution comes from the nature of the place itself: an active port, with cargo ships, docks and industrial traffic. Asking locally about safe zones before paddling out is a more basic reflex here than at a typical resort beach.

As for the wave, bigger swell days call for real experience — this isn't a spot for a first ocean session. Smaller days stay within reach of an intermediate level.

Salaverry remains largely overshadowed by Chicama and Huanchaco in surf guides, which makes it a quieter, more under-the-radar spot than its better-known neighbours to the north.

Trujillo and its region hold several of the biggest names in Peruvian surfing, starting with Chicama, a little further north, famous for its left point of more than two kilometres, one of the longest waves on Earth, and with Huanchaco and its caballitos de totora.

In the Yosurf catalogue, head due north to continue the trip: Pimentel, near Chiclayo, also keeps its own tradition of caballito-de-totora fishermen; further north still, the Piura region adds Punta Negra, Yacila, Punta Aguja and El Golf to the list, with water that warms up the closer you get to the equator.

And if you head back south towards the capital instead, a whole other side of Peruvian surfing awaits: the urban scene of Lima's Costa Verde, where the movement was born in 1942 around Club Waikiki.