Skift Take
A small country like Portugal is quick to take advantage of branding opportunities, and in this case, is taking a surfing world record to promote itself as the Hawaii of Europe to its landlocked neighbors.
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Hawaiian extreme surfer Garrett McNamara, who shattered an apparent world record this week by catching an estimated 100-foot wall of water off Portuguese fishing village of Nazaré, told Time.comthat in Nazaré, “the ocean is known as a place of death, not of riding waves.”
But that hasn’t stopped the Portugal’s tourism office from riding a wave of publicity: “We have 450 miles of clean Atlantic coastline, (and) some surfing beaches that are out of this world,” notes a release sent out after Monday’s jaw-dropping spectacle.