The Man Who Built A Kingdom Without A Crown

This should be a Premium article, but out of respect for Iñigo’s friends, family, and his impact on surfing as a whole, we decided to make it free to read. Unless otherwise noted, all photos courtesy of Adur Letamendia.

Long before there was Pukas — before people would surf a world-class lefthand rivermouth where the Gernika river meets the Atlantic Ocean, before Pukas ever showed up under the feet of the best in the world, before a hippie from San Sebastián became the unlikely architect of a continental surfing empire — there was the Kingdom of Pamplona.

Around 824 AD, Basque chieftain Íñigo Arista carved out a small, defiant Christian kingdom wedged between the Frankish Empire and the Emirate of Córdoba. It wasn’t size that defined this kingdom. It was the temperament of its people — a fierce, self-reliant, independent mountain culture that negotiated its future on its own terms and survived through wit and alliance rather than brute force.

Eleven centuries later, another Iñigo would channel that same stubborn, self-directed sense of freedom into fiberglass, fashion, and bikinis, driven less by the idea of building Europe’s largest surfboard factory than by the need to escape the Matrix.

Because Franco’s Spain during that time wasn’t interested in what made you happy. It was interested in what made you useful: military service, factory work, obedience. The dictatorship had spent decades trying to erase regional identities — banning Euskara in schools, replacing Basque names on government documents, treating centuries of autonomous tradition like a problem to be solved. For young Basques, the choice was clear: assimilate or resist. Most did both, finding ways to survive without surrendering who they were.

And this is where the Basque relationship with work becomes crucial to understanding Iñigo. Work isn’t just what Basques do. It’s who they are. In the mountain villages of the Basque Country, the greatest compliment you can give someone isn’t about their education, wealth, or lineage. It’s three simple words: “Lan haunditz egin.” I hope you have lots of work. It’s how you say “have a great day.” It’s their version of “may the force be with you.”

This is a culture that sent whaling crews into the North Atlantic centuries before most Europeans dared. A people who built ships for empires while maintaining their own ancient language that predates the Indo-European invasion.

When Basques emigrated to Wyoming and California in the 19th century, ranchers sought them out specifically because they could endure the kind of solitude and hardship that broke other men. They were lan haunditz egin personified: work as identity, as blessing, as prayer.

Under Franco, that work ethic became something else: quiet defiance. You couldn’t speak Euskara in schools, but you could teach it at home. You couldn’t fly the ikurriña, but you could maintain the fueros in memory. And if you were young and restless, surfing offered something the dictatorship hadn’t figured out how to regulate yet — a way to work with your hands, build something, and answer to no one but the tide.

When Iñigo Letamendia borrowed someone’s surfboard at La Concha in 1968, he understood immediately. Here was work he could love. Here was a life he could build. Here was the beginning of what would become the last Basque kingdom, and Iñigo its unlikely heir.

The escape artists

The early 1970s. Military service is compulsory. The “Tanganazo Boys” — Iñigo Letamendia, Raúl Dourdil, Merodio, Carlos Beraza — are trying to figure out how to make boards instead of spending years in uniform.

Some friends fake mental illnesses to avoid conscription, checking into psychiatric wards long enough to get documentation that makes them useless to the military. Others flee to the Canary Islands, where Franco’s machinery can’t quite reach.

Iñigo and his crew find a third way: Casa Lola in Santander, where they start building surfboards under the name “Tablas de Surf Santa Marina,” less as a business venture and more as an escape route from the future Franco’s Spain had laid out for young Basque men.

About a year later, Marian Azpiroz quit her gig running a hotel and followed her college sweetheart, Iñigo, from San Sebastián to Cantabria. While the boys spent their days covered in dust, chasing waves and perfecting rail lines, Marian cut up house curtains and turned them into bikinis, then boardshorts, then boardbags — the practical counterweight to their romantic visions of freedom. While they shaped foam, she built the revenue model.

There’s a photo from those early years. Sunburned kids with hair to their shoulders, half-finished boards leaning against stone walls, Marian at a sewing machine, someone probably rolling a cigarette in the corner. It looks like a commune. In a way, it was. But it was also the epicenter of what would become Europe’s most important surf family.

By 1977, they had rebranded as Geronimo Surfboards, named after the Apache war leader, another stubborn bastard who refused to surrender, and opened the second surf shop in all of Spain, in Zarautz.

Two families, one shop, splitting operations into two-week shifts. Every fifteen days, they’d switch, one pair heading across the imaginary border of Cantabria to shape through the night while the other held the fort in Zarautz — the only way to keep boards and rent both moving forward.

In 1979, Marian’s younger brother, Miguel Azpiroz “Pajarua,” joined them to complete the other half of the legacy. Miguel had been an eel fisherman in Aginaga, where his family was famous for working the angulas. Hard, cold, solitary work pulling eels from rivers in the dark. He gave it up for fiberglass dust and resin fumes.

Together, Iñigo, Marian, and Miguel made a decision that would shape European surfing for the next half-century. They renamed the brand Pukas. The name comes from the Hawaiian word for “hole.” On one level, it’s literal — the small white shells with natural openings that wash up on beaches across the Pacific. Hawaiians have strung them into necklaces for centuries — lei niho palaoa, lei pūpū — each shell small and individual, but connected through those holes into something larger, something whole.

Miguel saw something else in it. The hole wasn’t just the opening of a shell; it was the tube, the barrel, the reason any of this existed in the first place. And when you put the two ideas together — the shell as a connection, the hole as the wave — the name became a way to connect people: shapers from California, glassers from Australia, team riders from Hawaii, Basque kids learning to surf in Zarautz.

Each one is a Puka shell with its own opening, its own way of fitting into something larger. “If you connect enough Puka shells,” Miguel would say, “you create something bigger than the individual pieces.”

A family.

What do you love?

Iñigo had a question he would ask people often and repeatedly: “What do you love?”

Not what do you do? Not who you are. What do you love.

It’s strange how often the same word comes up in conversations about Iñigo. Love. Not a soft, sentimental kind. Basque love. The type you experience through actions: someone who builds you a board, feeds you, gives you a room, makes space for your grief, tells you the truth, and forgives you for being complicated.

Because he was complicated, everyone who loved him acknowledges that part too. The industry likes its heroes clean and its founders visionary. Real people are both more fragile and more interesting.

Iñigo had this intensity about him, the kind people felt but struggled to name. Some wouldn’t talk about it out of respect. Others couldn’t because they lacked the language for it.

The man lived like a live wire. He carried restlessness the way others carry ambition. He wasn’t calm, and he wasn’t trying to be. His mind chewed through life at a speed that could drain you or electrify you, depending on where you stood.

Kepa Acero — the liquid poet, world traveler, and perhaps one of the last true soul surfers of our generation — understood what others couldn’t articulate: “Part of his genius came from the same place as his struggles. There’s something braver in that truth than in any sanitized legacy. It makes the man more human, not less worthy.”

That question, “What do you love,” and the meaning behind it built something most surf companies never figured out. Like any family, it wasn’t perfect. There were complications, disappearances, and the weight that came with Iñigo’s restlessness. But the structure held because everyone who answered that question honestly became responsible for holding it together.

Jaime Azpiroz, Miguel’s son, now running what his father and uncle built, saw how it worked from the inside: “There’s a front end and a back end.”

The back end was Marian and Miguel. Marian, “the hardest-working woman I’ve ever seen,” Jaime says repeatedly, would make sure the place doesn’t turn into a resin-soaked circus, while his dad Miguel, who’d source the world’s best shapers, brought them to the Basque Country, building what he called “a shapers club.”

The third member of the trio, Iñigo, was pure front end. Not because he was the face, but because he understood people, what they loved, what they needed, and how to create space for both.

And he did it by erasing the line between family and everyone else. Most companies have employees, sponsors, and team riders. Pukas has family. Two kinds, technically — immediate and extended — but the distinction only counted on paper.

In practice, everyone operated the same way. You showed up, Marian fed you. You lost a heat, and the whole family went quiet, giving you space. You needed boards, Miguel sorted it. You had nowhere to stay, there was a room.

The immediate family was Marian, Miguel, and their kids. Then there was everyone else: Matt Biolos would fly in from California to shape in Oiartzun. Johnny Cabianca would do the same. Sunny Garcia would temporarily move in for the European tour stops, not out of sponsorship obligations but because he needed family, not a sponsor, and Iñigo understood the difference. Indo junior surf team manager & Asian Surf Co. (ACS) technical director Alex Hontoria became family through Pablo, Miguel’s son, and Kepa Acero became family the way Basque surfers always had, through the deeply rooted tradition of looking after your own.

No contracts determined who was in. No business logic explained it. Iñigo asked what you loved, you answered honestly, and he created space for it. After that, you were family, with everything that meant.

When the house caught fire

Every kingdom gets tested. In stories, it’s usually war or famine. In this one, it was a factory fire on a hot afternoon.

Olatu, the factory Miguel had built into the quiet engine of European surfboards, sat in Oiartzun, a town most people pass through without noticing on the way to somewhere else. But the location wasn’t an accident. Nothing with Miguel ever was.

When they were deciding where to build, the obvious choices were Zarautz or Donostia (San Sebastián), the two surf hubs of Gipuzkoa where everyone already knew the Pukas name. Miguel chose neither. He picked Oiartzun because it sat exactly between them, equidistant from both. Neutral ground. Pukas wouldn’t belong to one town’s crew or the other’s. It would belong to the whole coast. Even in geography, Pukas was thinking about family, about not creating division, about building something that could hold everyone.

That morning in summer, the factory had just received its entire historical collection back from the Wheels and Waves festival in Biarritz. Decades of boards. Every iconic shape that told the story of how three people in Casa Lola became Europe’s largest surfboard factory. By evening, the building was engulfed.

Miguel ran into the flames. Not for the new stock, the inventory they could replace, but for the old boards. For the history you can’t rebuild. Former Pukas staffer and Indo national surf team manager Alex Hontoria remembers that day as if it were yesterday: “For all of us who’d grown up with the brand, it was like, okay, guys, what can we do? We all lost something that day.”

You learn a lot about a family when something like that happens, not from how they talk but from how people respond around them.

The response was immediate. Phones started ringing before the last flames were out. Factory owners who, on paper, were competitors, old collaborators, shapers scattered around Europe, kids who’d learned to surf on hand-me-down Pukas boards. Everyone said the same essential thing in their own way: whatever we have, you can use it. Space, tools, time, labor.

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Surf factories in Santander offered production capacity. Pamplona opened its doors. The back room of the Pukas surf school in San Sebastián became a temporary glassing bay. Within days, boards were being shaped in five different locations, glassed in three others, sanded somewhere else entirely. A distributed network held together by the same question Iñigo had been asking for decades: What do you love?

The factory never stopped producing. It scattered, adapted, and survived through the collective stubbornness that kept the Basques independent for millennia. When one of your own burns, you don’t watch; you roll up your sleeves and help.

Within a year, they had a better facility — more capacity. The second generation learned what their parents had always known: family isn’t what you call people when business is good. It’s who shows up when your house is literally on fire.

What the second generation inherits

Jaime talks about running Pukas now like a man trying to honor a dream while working around modern capitalism’s indifference to dreams.

“The first generation showed us how to live,” he says. “But now Pukas is turning more into a company.”

Customers expect tracking for 800€ boards, perfect quality control, Europe’s brutal taxes on imported blanks and resin. Banks are demanding documentation. Government regulations. Time spent on compliance instead of at the beach checking the waves.

“Dad, you lied to me”, he says jokingly.

But he’s still here. His brothers Pablo and Marcos are still there. His cousins. Tala and Adur. All of them are building systems and processes around something that was never meant to have them. Professionalizing a dream without killing it in the process.

One way they’ve managed it is by knowing what not to change.

In Aginaga, in the same house where Miguel’s family fished for eels generations before anyone on this coast knew what a surfboard was, Marian’s bikini operation still runs.

Boni and her sister work at the same sewing machines, stitching the same designs Marian has been creating since she started cutting up curtains in Casa Lola because the boys needed something to keep the lights on. “Taller Txiki,” they call it — the Small Factory.

While the surfboard operation grew into a European empire, putting food on the table for a few dozen families, distributing for Channel Islands, …Lost, and Christenson, managing licensing deals and international logistics, the bikini workshop stayed exactly what it was all these years back.

Not because they couldn’t scale it, but because scaling it would mean losing the thread — literally and figuratively — that connects today’s work to the girl who followed a hippie surfer from San Sebastián to Cantabria and figured out how to make rent while he shaped foam.

The second generation understands something their parents taught them without saying it directly: some parts need to grow to survive modern business. Some parts need to stay small to survive at all.

Lan haunditz egin

My wife is Basque. Before I met her, I knew San Sebastián through Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. I knew Mundaka through Andy Irons’ absurd kick-stall no-hander in the 2002 Billabong Pro Final. I knew bits of the culture through school and through the Gudauskas Bros’ web series Down Days.

But I knew the Pukas name long before any of that, and I knew it because of Iñigo Letamendia. He spent decades connecting Europe to California, Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia — anywhere surfers searched for waves and boards got shaped. He built bridges through products, sure, but more importantly, through the radical act of welcoming people and building around what they brought.

Few people before him were as naturally gifted at connecting dots, people, and continents across an industry that usually builds walls instead of bridges. Fewer after will be.

When I heard of Iñigo’s passing, I started asking around. Reaching out to shapers who’d worked with Pukas, surfers who’d been team riders, people in direct competition with the brand. The surf industry is small and vicious; if there’s dirt, someone will tell you.

Nobody had a bad word to say.

What’s not to love about a man who turned hippie culture into Europe’s largest surfboard factory? Who built a family out of shapers, surfers, and anyone willing to show up earnestly? Who disappeared for weeks, came back as if no time had passed, and made you feel like the only person in the room when he was there?

The Kingdom of Pamplona survived nearly 400 years through a particular brand of Basque stubbornness. It eventually fragmented, was conquered, and absorbed. But the Basque identity survived everything Spain and the rest of the world threw at it.

Iñigo Letamendia built something similar. Not a kingdom in the traditional sense, but like Pamplona, it survived because the people who built it knew exactly what they were protecting.

Lan haunditz egin, Iñigo.

You worked plenty. You dreamed even more. You left behind something that can’t be quantified on a balance sheet or explained in a press release.

You left behind family.