Deep In The Weeds At Nazaré
How the Portuguese surf town is growing an underwater forest.
It’s tricky to slip Nazaré into conversation without resorting to superlatives. Biggest wave, deepest canyon, longest hold-down, etc.
Maybe this helps.
There’s a small experiment happening just down from the fortress that sits atop the unmistakable headland. Seatrees and Hope Zones Foundation have started a regenerative seaweed project just below Nazaré’s detonating peaks.
The Nazaré Regenerative Seaweed Farm, as it’s officially named, is essentially a man-made underwater kelp forest.
The project is led by Portuguese big-wave surfer João Macedo, who founded Hope Zones out of an altruistic desire to protect the ecosystems that keep the coastlines we take so much from alive.
Anyway. Kelp!
Kelp forests are the underwater equivalent of old-growth woodland. They’re dense, complex, and full of life. Fish shelter inside them, invertebrates feed through them, and entire coastal ecosystems reorganize in their presence. They can revive biodiversity, strengthen fish populations, and support the small coastal economies that have always depended on healthy oceans. They also happen to store carbon and cycle nutrients through the ocean in ways scientists are still trying to properly measure.
The west coast of Portugal has seen a decrease in its endemic kelp canopy over time, due to warming sea temperatures and often unsustainable human intervention. Over the decades, some of these forests were thinned down to just fragments of what they once were.
Since Nazaré’s seabed is mostly sand, the team installed floating grow lines three meters below the surface, seeded with kelp cultivated in a lab not too far off in Peniche. The structure hangs in the water like a suspended reef.
While some of the CO₂ we produce is absorbed by these growing underwater plants, scientists are closely monitoring the life of the forest through environmental DNA sampling, dive surveys, and a strict before-and-after monitoring framework. The question they’re trying to answer is theoretically quite simple: does kelp farming actually restore ecosystems?
Everyone involved is hoping the answer is ‘yes.’
The short film Grown in the Shadow of Mountains follows the project as it unfolds beneath surfing’s most mediatic big-wave venue, where surfers, fishermen, and scientists are all doing their part to figure out what a healthy ocean might look like again.
Watch Macedo, his former pupil and Nazaré standout Nic von Rupp, and Stab wetsuit-tester turned Naz lunatic Laura Crane, and Mason Barnes doing their part alongside the town’s original locals.
João Macedo would also like to express his gratitude to other members of the Hope Zones Foundation team — Lucas Chianca, Justine Dupont, Maya Gabeira, Garrett McNamara, Éric Rebière, and Stebastian Steudtner — for their support of this project.
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