South Africa

Cape Town is a city built between a mountain and the Atlantic, and the surf runs the seaboard accordingly: Dungeons, off Hout Bay, holds the serious big-wave swells; Long Beach and Big Bay work most winter days; the season runs April through September and the water is cold enough to mean it. What sets the city apart is everything that grew up between the mountain and the sea — a design and art scene that is internationally recognised and specifically South African, anchored by galleries like Everard Read, running since 1913. The hotels here sit on the Clifton and Bantry Bay cliffs and in the Gardens neighbourhood, and several hold art collections that would justify the trip on their own.

Jeffreys Bay, on the warmer Indian Ocean side, is the opposite proposition: a town built around a single wave. Supertubes is a right-hand point that runs three hundred metres through Boneyards, Supertubes, and The Point, each section faster and hollower than the last, and the WSL Championship Tour has stopped here for decades because there is nothing else quite like it anywhere. The best swell arrives May through September on Southern Ocean groundswells. Between the two towns, South Africa covers this collection's whole spectrum — gallery-grade design in the city, and guesthouses above the contest site where the owner can tell you which section is holding.