A cork board, long underwear and a wool sweater. That’s how Pedro Martins de Lima took to the sea for the first time — a 16-year-old kid doing in Portugal what no one had ever done before. For being the first, as journalist Joana Stichini Vilela wrote in the book LX60, “had the waves of the country all to himself” for almost 20 years. And that’s also why he was called the “father of Portuguese surfing”. But the life of Pedro Martins de Lima, which lasted almost a century, was much more than surfing and went well beyond Portugal and its waves.
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