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.
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.