South American company Olas Surfing Technologies and Spain’s Radical Surf Wave group announced this week they’ve launched plans for Technological Wave Park in the Canary Islands.

Olas Surfing Technologies (OST) of Ecuador is working together with Radical Surf Wave (RSW), a group of Spanish entrepreneurs led by Miguel Gomá, former director of Radical Surf Magazine. The concept is to create the Parque Tecnológico de las Olas which the group claim will be a new concept within the surf park industry.

The island of Fuerteventura is one of the Canary Islands, technically part of Spain. It’s often referred to as “Europe’s Hawaii” receiving around 200,000 surf tourists every year according to the group. OST and RSW say that with surfing being the main sport in the islands and with surf spots being crowded all year round, the park will appeal to both tourists and locals alike.

“The park’s roots will be set on training young locals to create and promote surfing and the industry,” said Diego Cornejo Rodríguez of OST. “Parque Tecnológico de las Olas will also be used for developing and innovating new and more sustainable technologies in the surf industry.”

The project has received a piece of land from the Municipality with rights for the next 30 years, as well as a pool of investors.

“This is certainly a unique project focusing on surf tourism, education, technology and the creation of a surfing industry within the park. The wave pool will be just one of the components of the park but not the most important one,” said Miguel Gomá, PTO founder and promoter. “Formal professional education along with a business incubator and accelerator will provide the island’s youth with opportunities to create surfing-related products and services that can be offered locally as well as exported. The PTO will also feature a surfing museum.”

According to Olas Surfing Technologies, their wave machine uses a “stacking module system” similar to Cove wave-generation with differences on the patent-level of things. The system was developed by British physicist John Baxendale in 2009 and claims to use no compressed-air, hydraulics or pneumatics. In 2018 Diego Andres Cornejo Rodriquez purchased Baxendale’s intellectual property to create the Olas company.

Olas says they will be able to offer five different pool configuration options for different types of customer needs. But added that they have yet to finalize which type will be used in Fuertaventura.

“We can take or add the number of modules and modify the size of the pool, or if necessary, start only with a right, and later on grow by building the lefts pool, or vice versa,” said Diego. “For those clients planning to grow, our technology allows also for dual mirror pool configurations that can be scalable. This is both for pools with rights that will mirror a pool with lefts, or with split peak pools that can grow to mirror another back-to-back split peak pool with no extra cost for swell generation.”

Olas says the system can also create reform waves using the same initial energy output as the first main wave. It’s just a matter of space.

“We will also be using energy regenerators and thanks to how our modular technology is set up, we will be able to save additional energy in some wave types,” adds Diego. “Our final, modular wave system generation technology has been tested successfully at 1:10 scale, and we have finalized the engineering design for a real-size module.”

Diego said that people in the surf park industry have compared the wave formation to something similar to the Surf Ranch.

“Expert surfers have compared our wave to Kelly Slater’s wave,” said Diego. “Our advantage over Kelly’s is the aesthetic experience of a long wall of laminar flow, true surf poetry, without the train in front of the surfer.”