The idea that “Surfing” may have originated in Peru over 3000 years ago sounds a little far-fetched but, for at least 3,500 years, fishermen along the Peruvian coast have been making reed-bound boats, Caballitos, and surfing the waves back to shore.
Three-metre-high waves crash onto Playa El Mogote in the northern Peruvian seaside village of Huanchaco. A mix of locals and international tourists surf in the Pacific, but around a curve in the coastline, the arched prows of caballitos de totora line the beach, their bows pointing towards the ocean.
Known as tup in Mochica, one of Peru’s extinct Indigenous languages, or caballitos (“little horses”) in Spanish, these ancient crafts are made with tightly tied bundles of totora reeds that grow in freshwater ponds near the coast. Their signature upturned, narrow bow both slices through and pops up over the waves. The Pacific is anything but peaceful here, and in recent years its epic swells have been drawing modern surfers from around the world.
However, for those who have lived on this coast for thousands of years, caballitos were the only thing that could punch through the waves to help them reach their fishing areas and allowed them to surf their way back to the beach. Huanchaceños, who still make caballitos, are proud of their crafts, which some have claimed are one of the world’s earliest surfboards, though every year fewer people here are learning the art of cultivating totora and constructing caballitos. Now, this ancient tradition is at risk of disappearing in the next few decades.
Surfing is commonly believed to have been invented in Hawaii and petroglyphs depicting people riding waves date to at least the 12th Century CE. Yet, the Chan Chan Museum near Huanchaco, and the Larco Museum in Lima, display ancient ceramics showing people and gods using caballitos to surf, fish and even transport prisoners that predate this.
“Nobody here fishes with a wooden boat,” said Carlos Ucañan Arzola, one of Huanchaco’s last caballito makers. “Totora is traditional and ancestral, from the Mochicas (also known as the Moche culture dating from the 1st-8th Centuries CE). This totora was preserved in Chan Chan,” he added, referring to the 7th-Century Chimú city whose centre is only 5km from Huanchaco. Renowned Peruvian historian María Rostworowski believes these ceramics may date back even earlier to at least 1400 BCE.
Caballitos measure about 4m long, a little under 1m wide and can carry loads up to 100kg. When they’re dry, the boats weigh about 40kg, but after a morning fishing, they can weigh twice that and must be set upright on the beach to dry for a day or two.
Today, Huanchaco’s roughly 40 remaining fishermen all still use caballitos when they go out to set or check their nets. But as large commercial fishing boats have encroached on the coast, and an increase in erosion and litter often leaves the nets tangled or ripped, fishermen say the trade is becoming less profitable every year. As a result, many Huanchaceños have turned to tourism or left to seek opportunities elsewhere.
“There’s only three men in my generation who fish on a caballito,” said 30-year-old Edwin Blas Arroyo, who started learning to fish on a caballito from his uncle and grandfather when he was only seven.
“In Huanchaco there is a community that’s remarkably proud, conscious of their past, the heritage of their culture and their knowledge, which dates to the times of the Mochicas and the Chimús (12th-16th Centuries), people who were intimately linked to the sea,” wrote Marina Quiñe, a professor of marine biology at Lima’s Universidad Científica del Sur in her study The caballito de totora in Huanchaco. “Since its origin, fishing with a caballito de totora has been practiced without interruption on the Peruvian coast.” Jordi Rivera Prince, an anthropological bioarchaeologist who specialises in ancient Andean coastal fishing communities, noted, “The design of a caballito is virtually unchanged in the past 3,500 years … It’s history and living culture at the same time.”
Today many caballito fishermen are in their 40s and 50s, and when they surf back to the beach while sitting down and steering with their bamboo pole, two or three young men wade into the water to catch the boat and pull it up on the sand. After each fisherman empties his catch from the hollow in the back of the craft onto the sand, one of the younger men will hoist the caballito on his shoulders and carry it up the beach to dry. Fishermen always share their catch with these helpers, and with older men who can no longer fish but who come to the beach in the morning. Fish are distributed to the younger generation in gratitude and to the older generation out of respect. Perhaps if the younger generation can remember the caballito’s surfing roots, they may be able to ensure its survival.
If you visit the area, you can pay for a ride on a caballito, but you have to sit in the area where the fish are stored, which means you face backwards and can’t see the waves coming. Be prepared to be soaked almost continually.
