Wheels & Waves Is Not a Motorcycle Festival
It's a surf gathering that happens to have motorcycles, a motorcycle gathering that happens to have waves, and the last place in Europe where both cultures actually mean something to each other.
Pemulis Water & Power • February 2026
For most of the twentieth century, surfers and bikers occupied the same coastal geography and had almost nothing to do with each other. They shared the Pacific Coast Highway and the A-roads along the Basque littoral, they shared the same general preference for being outside and moving fast and not answering to anyone, and they regarded each other with the specific indifference of subcultures that are close enough to be mistaken for relatives but different enough to resent the comparison. Oil and saltwater. Leather and neoprene. The noise of a boxer twin and the silence of a clean set rolling in at dawn. These worlds overlapped physically and diverged in every other way that mattered, and the separation was so total and so longstanding that by the time anyone thought to question it, it had hardened into something that felt natural — as though the division between people who ride waves and people who ride motorcycles was a law of cultural physics rather than an accident of history that nobody had bothered to correct.
Then, in 2012, a group of friends from the Basque coast decided to correct it. Jérôme Allé, Julen Azé, and Vincent Prat — collectively The Southsiders MC — had been organizing informal spring rides through the Pyrenees since 2008 or 2009, crossing the mountains from southern France into Spain with whoever wanted to come, and what they noticed over those early rides was that the people who showed up weren't just motorcyclists. They were surfers who rode bikes, skaters who surfed, artists who did all three, musicians who did none of them but understood the impulse. The rides kept attracting the same kind of person: someone who didn't fit cleanly into any single subculture and who was tired of events that demanded they pretend to. So Allé, Azé, and Prat built an event for that person, anchored it to the lighthouse in Biarritz, gave it a name that welded together the two things their crowd had in common — wheels and waves — and let it grow.
It grew. From a few hundred people in 2013 to over a thousand, to three thousand in 2014, to ten thousand by 2015, and by the 2020s Wheels & Waves had become arguably the most important motorcycle-adjacent cultural event in Europe, which is a category it had to invent because nothing like it existed before. It is not Glemseck 101, which draws forty thousand people to a sprint strip in Stuttgart and runs café racers down an eighth-mile in a format that is fundamentally about speed and machines. It is not the Distinguished Gentleman's Ride, which spans dozens of cities worldwide and is structured around charity and tweed and the pleasantly theatrical experience of dressing well on a motorcycle for a good cause. Wheels & Waves is something else — looser, weirder, less concerned with any single discipline and more interested in what happens when you stop separating them.
Five Days on the Basque Coast
The festival runs five days in June, centered on Biarritz but spilling across the border into the Spanish Basque Country, and what happens across those five days is deliberately resistant to the kind of programmatic summary that most event coverage relies on. There is Punk's Peak, the quarter-mile uphill sprint on the road up Mount Jaizkibel — started with a pistol shot, lined with barbed wire and grass, the Atlantic visible over the riders' shoulders as they climb �� which is the closest thing the festival has to a signature event and which operates on a "run what you brung" philosophy that welcomes pre-1950 machines alongside modern superbikes and categorizes one of its entry classes as, simply, "Inappropriate." There is El Rollo, the flat-track race held at the Hipódromo de San Sebastián, a 250-meter dirt oval where the bikes have no front brakes and the corners are taken entirely on slide and commitment. There is La Copita, the 50cc race that functions as the festival's philosophical core: tiny engines, maximum effort, the explicit argument that horsepower is for those who know no better and that winning is fine but sad if it's all you can do.
And then there is everything around the racing that makes Wheels & Waves what it actually is: the surf sessions, the skate competitions, the art installations, the live punk and rock sets, the DJ nights, the open-air cinema, the Wall of Death motorcycle show, the group rides through the Pyrenees that loop from the French coast into the Spanish mountains and back. The festival is dense with activity in a way that resists specialization — you can't attend Wheels & Waves as purely a motorcycle person or purely a surf person or purely an art person, because the programming doesn't allow for those boundaries to hold. You end up watching a flat-track race in the afternoon and a punk band at night and a sunrise surf session the next morning, and the proximity of these experiences to each other, the fact that the same people show up to all of them, is the festival's argument about what these cultures have in common.
"Horsepower is for those that know no better, and winning is alright but sad if that's all you can do."
The Geography Matters
Biarritz is not an arbitrary location. The French Basque coast is one of the few places in Europe where serious surf culture and serious motorcycle culture developed independently and in genuine proximity, not as imported lifestyle aesthetics but as practical responses to the same landscape — long coastal roads that demand a vehicle, and waves that are consistent enough to build a life around. The Basque Country straddles France and Spain, which gives the festival a built-in internationalism that isn't performed but geographic: the sprint race is on a Spanish mountain, the flat-track oval is at a Spanish hippodrome, the lighthouse is French, the riders come from everywhere, and the borders between nations feel about as meaningful as the borders between subcultures, which is to say not very.
El Solitario MC, based four hundred kilometers southwest in Galicia, has been part of Wheels & Waves since before it was Wheels & Waves — David Borras participated in the legendary 2010 ride through the Pyrenees near Toulouse with The Southsiders that preceded the formal festival, and El Solitario's presence at every subsequent edition has been so consistent and so central that they function less as participants than as resident philosophers, the people who articulate most clearly what the event means and why it matters. The Mononoke, El Solitario's Ducati 350 race build, was designed specifically for the Punk's Peak sprint. Their 50cc entries have become legends of La Copita. Their blog coverage of Wheels & Waves reads like dispatches from a homeland, written by people who understand that this particular gathering, on this particular coastline, is the closest thing their worldview has to a church.
What It's Not
The temptation, in writing about Wheels & Waves, is to position it as the antidote to something — the commercial motorcycle industry, the algorithm-driven content cycle, the gentrification of counterculture. And the temptation is not entirely wrong: the festival does stand in contrast to events where the brand activations outnumber the riders and the photo opportunities are engineered to produce social media content for sponsors. But framing Wheels & Waves purely as resistance gives it a coherence it doesn't actually claim. The organizers' stated philosophy is simpler and harder: to be modern and progressive, to break down social barriers, to gather without judging others, and to respect the old while encouraging the new. There is no manifesto pinned to the lighthouse. There is just a week in June when the Basque coast fills up with people who ride and surf and skate and make things, and the only organizing principle is that nobody has to choose one identity over the others.
This is harder to maintain than it sounds. Every event that succeeds eventually faces the same pressure: to define itself, to brand itself, to make itself legible to sponsors and media and the broader public that might attend if the event could be explained in a single sentence. Wheels & Waves has grown large enough that BMW and Honda and Husqvarna and Indian now participate officially, and the electric motorcycle brand LiveWire brought demo rides to the 2025 edition, and at some point the question of whether the festival can stay weird while getting big becomes the only question that matters. So far, the answer appears to be yes, partly because the Basque coast itself resists commercialization — the landscape is too rugged, the weather too unpredictable, the logistics too awkward for the kind of seamless corporate event production that smooths the edges off everything it touches — and partly because the people who run it seem genuinely uninterested in scaling the thing into something it isn't.
"We aim to be modern and progressive and to break down social barriers and to gather without judging others."
— Wheels & Waves organizers
Wheels & Waves returns to Biarritz every June. If you surf and you ride, or if you ride and you skate, or if you make things and want to be around other people who make things without anyone asking you to pick a lane, it is the best week of the year. We carry El Solitario MC at Pemulis Water & Power — the riding gear and apparel from the people who helped build the culture this festival celebrates.
Level up your riding gear with our El Solitario MC collection, including the Dirt Wolves T-Shirt and Wolf MX Jersey.