Siargao Island: Surf Culture and Community Spirit
I had come to Siargao, an island in the southeastern Philippines, to chase the sun. However, it turns out that it’s the moon that dictates life’s rhythm here. When it hangs in the night as a milky orb, whole families flock to the beach to fill their buckets with the kayabang crabs that leave their inland burrows in the twilight. Siargao’s yogis align their chakras to the lunar cycle; and for surfers, the island’s lifeblood, it’s the moon that decides whether they ride Tuason Point, Quicksilver, Salvacion, or any of the other reef breaks pounding the eastern coast.
One early June morning, the salty air still electric from the previous night’s full moon, I’m bobbing on a longboard in the waves rolling off the island’s southeastern shore. I watch my friend, local surf pro Ikit Agudo, carve the rollers on her pink board like a knife through hot butter. Her father drifts in his banka boat a few meters away. At 66, he still takes his board out between fishing trips. Agudo’s bronzed complexion glows in the sun – years ago, city girls would tease her for her dark skin; these days, Manileños pay good money for the same sun-streaked locks running down her back. “Siargao’s surf culture has changed the mindset of Filipino women here,” she says. “We’ve become more open-minded. Rich or poor, male or female, the ocean doesn’t discriminate – we all ride the same waves. The power of Mother Nature is the greatest equaliser.”
Like most surfing destinations, present-day Siargao grew out of a hunt for the perfect wave, and its origin story is wrapped in layers of lore. Some people will tell you it was an American loner nicknamed Mad Max (posthumously identified as surf legend Mike Boyum, of Indonesia’s G-Land notoriety) who, in the late ’80s, first rode Siargao’s now-legendary right-hander, later dubbed Cloud 9 after the local chocolate bars that fuelled many a surf session back then. Others insist it was Cuba-born photographer Tony Arruza and Aussie surfer Steve Jones who chanced upon the glassy barrel in 1980. Either way, the secret got out.
Over the following decades, Siargao firmly claimed its stake on the global surf circuit, birthing its own crop of legends along the way: local stars such as Manuel “Wilmar” Melindo and Rudy Figuron, and now Agudo and her sister Aping, have flown the Filipino flag in surf competitions from El Salvador to Byron Bay. Siargao’s main town, General Luna – or GL, which rolls off the tongue in the same mellow cadence as everything that moves along its palm-flanked roads – grew from a nondescript fishing village into a jumble of scrappy board shops and hammock-strung hostels, inhabited by salty-haired surfers, tattooed tag-alongs, and burnouts from Manila, Cebu, and further afield. Between surf sessions, they’d hop from tidal rock pools to brilliantly blue lagoons and gather to skate at the Catangnan Bridge, where food stalls pop up every orange sunset. All the digital nomads and itinerant surfers found what most Filipinos will tell you: that the warm-hearted Siargaoans are some of the most hospitable people in the Philippines.
However, pandemic-related restrictions had already threatened Siargao’s upward trajectory when, around lunchtime on 16 December 2021, super typhoon Odette unleashed its fury on the island, reducing much of it to rubble. Everyone I meet has their story of that fateful day. Of children zipped up in suitcases for safety; of extended families huddled under mattresses in tiny concrete bathrooms, praying for the best. They show me shaky videos on their phone – all collapsed roofs and palm trees snapped like toothpicks – and tell me about the excruciating uncertainty of those first few days, unable to find loved ones because there was no mobile phone signal.
Nevertheless, it takes more than a typhoon to break the local bayanihan, or community spirit. Agudo had diverted to Manila after a surf competition, but within hours collected thousands of pesos through a fundraiser among her sizeable Instagram following. Donations poured in from California, Toronto, and beyond. She returned to Siargao on the first flight, still unsure if her friends and family had made it through alive (they had). “The sunset that evening was beautiful,” she tells me. “But looking down, all I could see was smoke and debris.”
On that same plane was a letter from Kara Rosas, cofounder of Siargao-based NGO Lokal Lab, hastily scribbled with the instruction to be delivered to her friends in the island’s north. “It’ll be alright,” it read, along with the promise that she would do everything she could to help from her family’s home in Manila. “Everything was so bleak, it was a scary place,” says Rosas. “We thought we needed years for Siargao to rise back.” But the community moved fast. Surfers drummed up construction crews and building materials, while Rosas and her team helped orchestrate community kitchens and sawmills to turn fallen coconut trees into lumber. Within months, a sense of normality returned, and green leaves had started peeping between the rubble.
I join Rosas on a drive north to check out some of Lokal Lab’s projects, a taste of the tours the company has started offering to day trippers. With the surf-frenzied buzz of Siargao’s southeastern shore fizzing out behind us, the barangay villages flanking the road lose their beachy clobber, the wicker lampshades and driftwood trinkets giving way to plywood walls and crinkle-cut steel roofs. We see children in neatly ironed school garb, brush past candy-coloured churches and sari-sari stores strung with metallic sachets of Nescafé, laundry powder, and cardboard signs advertising balut (fertilised duck egg) for 45 cents a pop.
As the road snakes upwards, the landscape unfurls into an undulating carpet of coconut palms. At one hilltop viewpoint, enterprising locals sell buko juice (coconut water) and offer their services as acrobatic “human drones” to capture sweeping smartphone camera footage for the gaggles of Filipino weekenders tumbling out of tricycles and minivans. Rosas tells me that, while they are undeniably scenic, coconut palms have overtaken much of Siargao’s native jungle cover since the 1980s and that, despite being some of the top exporters in the world, coconut farmers are among the poorest in the Philippines.
In 2019, she gave up her NGO job in Manila and moved out here to “put real faces to the reports and numbers”. Together with two friends, she founded Lokal Lab to showcase Siargao as a self-sustainable island, exploring solutions to issues such as land degradation, pollution, and poverty that big-city policymakers couldn’t fix from afar. “Siargao attracts so many interesting people,” she says. “We bring everyone together to help out the communities that call it home.”
We stop for a lunch of tortang talong (aubergine omelette) and blue butterfly pea rice served on banana leaves at Lokal Lab’s latest project, the bamboo-clad Tropical Academy, in the island’s rural heart. Part vocational school and part showcase farm, it teaches farmers to make their land disaster-resilient; to look beyond their coconut palms and grow fruits and native trees in their shade. Rosas shows me around the open kitchens that host day trippers, and the compost heaps squirming with worms – one of the circular farming techniques the academy hopes to share with the rural communities. “Odette showed us the importance of disaster resilience,” she says. “We’re at the frontline of the climate crisis.”
Perhaps the biggest indicator that Siargao is on the mend, though, is the reopening of Nay Palad Hideaway, which, after more than a decade in business, is still the island’s smartest place to stay. A community of curving thatched roofs spread out between tangled mangroves and a palm-pinned beach, it has everything you’d hope to find in a go-slow place like this: sandy pathways swirling around frangipani-scented gardens, hidden pavilions for sunrise yoga, and a menuless restaurant. But Odette didn’t go easy on it. After spending months helping the local community to get back on its feet, the team have taken well over a year to bring the resort back to its former glory. “If we’d have given up, it would’ve sent such a signal to the island,” says Hervé Lampert, who co-owns the resort.
I slip off my shoes when I arrive and don’t need them back until I leave four days later. I fill the time in between with boat hops to islands nearby, where Nay Palad’s team have set up picnics on the beach and fleabag puppies beg for the shrimp skewers I can’t finish. Enjoy candlelit dinners of zingy gazpacho and sweet-sour “chicken very good nice” in tucked-away dining nooks; long, lazy stretches at the pool, which seems to melt into the turquoise horizon.
One night, I head out for dinner at CEV, a joint on the way to Cloud 9 that specializes in kinilaw, the Filipino answer to ceviche. Manileño owner David del Rosario, who moved here in 2017, quit his finance career to attend culinary school in New York in preparation for opening this restaurant. We share plates of vinegar-cured fish dressed in coconut milk and calamansi, and bowls of pickled mango and crispy fish. “Most people don’t come here to make lots of money,” he says, spooning chili oil over his rice. “They come here to surf and be part of a cool community. The waves bring everyone together, it makes the friendships deep and the partying pure.”
As with other popular tourist destinations, it’s easy to imagine that investors with big ideas may make Siargao their next El Dorado. Plans for an international airport are underway; blocky hotels, still wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and rumored to bear big-brand names, have started poking out of the jungle fringe. One day, I spot the googly-eyed mascot of Filipino fast-food chain Jollibee dancing on the back of a boombox-blasting pick-up truck.
Still, those waves keep rolling, and the moon keeps on giving life to the island. When I walk down the beach one early evening, a fuzzy karaoke sound system croons from across the bay, and I hear the words to “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Delivered with gusto, and endearingly off-key, they feel just about right for this resilient community that surfs together and stays together.
Where to Stay in Siargao
Nay Palad Hideaway
Arriving at this Siargao mainstay, with its cone-shaped roofs, bird’s nest-like lounge nooks, and swing chairs dangling from crooked palms, feels like stumbling into a Mad Hatter’s tea party on the beach. The vibe is fittingly free-wheeling, with a menu-less restaurant, breezy rooms, and barefoot staff. The all-inclusive formula ensures pure toes-in-sand relaxation.
Maison Bukana
Enveloped in a tangle of monsteras and palms at the end of a beachy cul-de-sac, this angular four-bedroom villa is the crashpad of choice for smart Manileños with friends and family in tow. French-Filipino proprietor Christophe Bariou, whose family has owned the beachfront plot for more than three decades, worked closely with local craftspeople to construct the villa as sustainably as possible, resulting in bamboo roofs, a rainwater-fed swimming pool, and walls built with innovative blocks created from reclaimed plastic waste.
Bombora
A potholed sandy path branching off the main road of sleepy Santa Fe leads to this duo of glass-walled villas, whose thatch-covered roofs poke out above bamboo walls. Fireflies dance around the trees in a private tropical garden. The look is Ibiza meets Bali by way of the rug dealers in Marrakech’s medina, and what the villas lack in service, they make up for with fully kitted-out open kitchens and alfresco bathtubs.
Where to Eat and Drink in Siargao
Surfers crowd the tables of General Luna’s White Beard Coffee for brick-thick French toast and lattes poured by owner Arnie Cotecson, a former head barista in Google’s Singapore office. Come nightfall, the in-crowd moves to Barbosa, a living room-like cocktail spot or nearby tapas bar Bonnie, inspired by Madrid’s hole-in-the-wall joints.
At CEV, chef-owner David del Rosario serves up experimental takes on ceviche and kinilaw, mixing sashimi-grade fish with ingredients such as sweet potato, salted black beans, and a leche de tigre-inspired coconut dressing. For real-deal Neapolitan pizzas, everyone points to Kermit, whose Swiss-Italian owner Gianni Grifoni has slung dough here since 2011 and now has a branch in Manila.
