From Madrid to El Palmar: Why Carving Changed Base

Carving Social Club was born in Madrid in 2011 around a fairly simple question: how can we continue to work on our surfing when the sea is hundreds of kilometers away?

For years we sought answers in surfskate, specific training, the swimming pool, physical preparation, tutorials, and trips to the coast.

Madrid was our laboratory. El Palmar eventually became the place where all those pieces could finally meet the sea.

Learning to surf far from the ocean

When we started, practicing surf movements out of the water was not as common as it is now.

We used surfskate to repeat movements, developed specific training for surfers, worked in the pool, and created content to explain concepts that we then tried to transfer to the water.

Classes in Madrid, training sessions, and trips allowed us to spend years testing which tools made sense and which didn't.

The goal was never to replace the sea. It was to arrive better prepared when we could finally get into it.

But there was always a missing piece

We could practice movements, prepare the body, and study technique, but surfing depends on something you cannot fully reproduce hundreds of kilometers from the coast.

You have to learn to read the sea, choose a wave, position yourself, paddle, make decisions, and constantly adapt to something that is changing in front of you.

Trips and the first Surfcamps made it increasingly clear that we wanted to dedicate more time precisely to that part.

El Palmar eventually became our base

Over time, we concentrated the project in El Palmar de Vejer, Cadiz.

From here, we can much more naturally connect everything we had developed in previous years: surfing, video analysis, surfskate, preparation, reading the sea, and enough time to go back into the water and test what we learned.

Our Surfhouse in El Palmar also became the base from which we organized a good part of that activity.

What happened to the activities in Madrid

As the project focused on El Palmar, we stopped regularly offering the activities we had organized for years in Madrid: Surf Training, surfskate classes, and other training formats.

It was not because those tools ceased to make sense. In fact, they still form part of our way of working when they can help someone better understand their surfing.

What changed was the place from which we wanted to use them.

Surfskate did not disappear from Carving

For years we gave classes, published tutorials, tested systems and configurations, and worked very closely with some of the main surfskate brands.

Today we still use it, but no longer as the core of the project.

We use it as a training tool within our Surfskate classes in El Palmar, Surfcamps, and Technical Improvement programs when we want to isolate and repeat certain movements out of the water.

Everything learned in Madrid is still here

Carving did not start over when it arrived in Cadiz.

El Palmar is the continuation of everything we had been doing for years in Madrid.

The difference is that now we can observe a forecast, enter the water, record a session, analyze it, work on something out of the sea, and surf again with that information still fresh.

That cycle is much more difficult when the ocean is hundreds of kilometers away.

And Madrid is still part of our history

Many of the people who come to our Surfcamps today met Carving in Madrid or still travel from there to El Palmar.

That's why we don't want to erase that stage. It is part of how we learned, of the people who were part of the project, and of many of the ideas we still use today.

If you want to go through the complete story, you can visit Our History or enter our Carving Archive.

What we do now in El Palmar

We currently concentrate our activity around surfing in El Palmar: Surfcamps, surf classes, Technical Improvement, surfskate, and accommodation in our Surfhouse.

The question we asked ourselves in Madrid is still practically the same: what can we do to better understand our surfing and make the most of the time we spend in the water.

Only now we can try to answer it by the sea.