Sundays Are for the Girls

It’s 10:27 a.m. on Sunday, and a fresh summer south swell has made contact with Barra de la Cruz. Lines fan in from the cobalt horizon and peel down the sand point. Not quite the mind-bending barrel fiesta it will always be compared to in 2006, when the Rip Curl Search cast its global spotlight on the wave—those days are rare. But by anyone’s account, this is a mighty fine morning to be a surfer. Well, a female surfer.

First up is Juliette Lacome, a 22-year-old QS hopeful from France. She takes off on the outside, adjacent to the smooth, tan boulders at the tip of the point, and the regular-footer surfs with moxie, hitting the closeout section with a zippy jab and belly riding to shore. Next up is Coral Muñoz, a 14-year-old who has been surfing Barra since she was four. The local has a compact style and executes three well-placed carves before the wave runs off without her. Third in line is Regina Pioli, a goofy footer who grew up in Huatulco, the sprawling city north of Barra. She goes vertical once. Twice. And head over heels on the third bash. It is the first (and only) time all week that no dudes will be on a set at one of Mexico’s most crowded point breaks. 

The community recently designated a two-hour session on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. for women and children. The first of its kind. 

“Have you ever been to a spot that holds a session for girls?” I ask Lacome, holding my recorder close to her face as she saunters up the beach. Horseflies bite our feet in the scalding sand, the sun is already high in the sky, withering the skin of all gringos who stand in its path. 

“No, I've never seen anything like this,” she says. “It's actually insane. Last Sunday, some boys wouldn't get out of the water, and the Mexican guys started yelling at them like, ‘Hey, it's the girls’ turn!’”

“Do you surf differently without guys in the water?” I ask. 

“For sure. Not many barrels where I live, so today I’m waiting at the top of the point for the hollow ones.”

Unlike Salina Cruz, the set of scalloped points to the south that require pricey surf guides to access each wave, Barra operates more like a public pool. Drive down the dirt road at the end of the town, and a man named Ramon will charge you $100 pesos ($5.39 U.S.) for each day of surfing. The money is put into a pot to subsidize the commons: a hospital, septic, and potholes for the well-trodden road. This policy makes Barra the most crowded of any of the southern points. On a given morning, there could be fifty traveling surfers dotting the lineup, plus an established cadre of locals who are happy to take your waves. The competitive lineup results in scraps for women and little kids, who tend to sit on the inside, hoping one of their male counterparts will eat shit before the final section. 

The session goes by fast, and at 12:45 p.m., I sit in a shaded palapa on the beach next to Chuchu’s Ding Repair with Muñoz and Pioli and sip a sweating Coca-Cola—with real cane sugar because I’m classy. The wind has turned onshore, but ceaseless five-wave sets continue to spin down the point on the 5 feet @16 second south swell.

“Every day, I try to focus on one maneuver,” says Muñoz in Spanish. “But it’s hard on crowded days because I don’t want to fall. Today I was focusing on explosive turns.”

Barra de la Cruz has long since instituted its own micro-democracy, and was recognized as a comunal in 1964. Each household carries a vote, and land sales cannot be executed without the unanimous consent of the voters. Sales to non-citizens are strictly prohibited. Compared to many towns along Oaxaca’s coast, pocked with foreign land grabs and half-built high-rise hotels crowned with rebar, Barra has remained steadfast in local control of the pueblo. Despite the attention on the wave, roads are still largely unpaved, opulent villas are absent, and there are only two spots to get dinner in town—Gemelas and El Dragon Pizza.

This intentionally languid pace of development has kept control in local hands, allowing Barra to more easily experiment with progressive policies like Sunday’s session.

Regina Pinoli didn’t start surfing until she was a teenager, but with the world-class rights at her fingertips, she improved fast. “I was a waitress,” she said. “And I got my shifts in the afternoons, so I had every morning to surf. Whenever I could find friends to come, we’d all pitch in for gas and go to Barra.” (There are no gas stations in the town, FYI.)

Related: Australian Women Surfers Face Significant Barriers To Getting Barreled

Although the session benefits women and little kids, it was men from La Asociación de Surf de La Barra de la Cruz, who came up with the idea and enforce it each weekend. At 10 a.m., a local walks to the edge of the sand, sounds a piercing whistle, and it’s time for a shift change. 

Some may roll their eyes at what could be seen as DEI in the lineup, but this perspective will likely be more popular among non-surfers who have not actually experienced the serpent’s pit of a crowded lineup. Few sports suffer from supply and demand issues like surfing, and when resources are scarce, we humans (ahem, hand raised here) quickly regress into a myopic winner-take-all mentality. On any given day, 90 percent of set waves go to 10 percent of surfers—all of whom are male. Skateboarding, by contrast, will always imbue more camaraderie because the skatepark is a virtually limitless resource. When a kid drops in on a halfpipe for the first time, it’s customary for everyone to clank their skateboards on the coping and cheer. When a surfer is flying down the line, our first thought is usually, “Please fall.” 

Sundays at Barra are a dash of chivalry in arguably the most selfish sport on earth.

“There was a lady who was a little nervous about paddling out today,” says Pioli. “I told her, ‘Just try. It’s so much less intimidating when there are plenty of waves.’” 

Sundays Are for the Girls first appeared on Surfer on Jul 28, 2025