Back in 2003, a group of friends who, in their own words, lived and breathed surf, decided to make a magazine. It was not a business plan. It was people who were in the water and thought somebody ought to be writing this down. They called it ONFIRE.
Twenty three years later it is still coming out, in print, every two months, directed by Nuno Bandeira and edited by António Nielsen. That reads plainly enough, but it is worth stopping on. In that same span surf titles with decades behind them, and money behind that, folded. ONFIRE did not.
What surviving print actually means
Making a surf magazine in Portugal was never easy money. The market is small, advertisers are few, and the internet took the classifieds first, then the news, and finally the reader's patience. ONFIRE's answer was not to run from paper. It was to work out what paper is still for.
A heat result is read on a phone and forgotten in two hours. A long feature, with real photography, with room for an image to breathe and for a paragraph to take the time it needs, is a different animal. It still earns a magazine, and it is still the only way certain stories get told.
Alongside it they built the digital house: a site since 2009, rebuilt in 2012, daily news, the archive readable online. The site did not replace the magazine. Both stayed, doing different jobs. That is the hardest call to make and the easiest one to postpone.
What they publish
In the summer of 2026, as this piece was being written, their pages carried this: A Travessia, by João Flecha Meneses. Francisca Veselko in the quarter finals of the US Open of Surfing. Teresa Bonvalot winning an all Portuguese final in Ballito. Polen Surfboards' new Master Mid. And John John Florence, because Portuguese surf is also read through what happens elsewhere.
Look at that list. Three Portuguese names in top level competition, a national board brand, and one of the best in the world. It is not a parish newsletter and it is not a translation of the foreign press. It is both at once, which is exactly where Portuguese surf lives.
Twenty three years is an archive
This is the part people notice late. A publication that lasts more than two decades stops being a magazine and becomes the written memory of a sport in a country.
Anyone who wants to know who was surfing Ericeira in 2007, which boards were snapping that year, who won what and, above all, how it was told at the time rather than in hindsight, has somewhere to go. Without ONFIRE, those years of Portuguese surf would live almost entirely in the heads of the people who were there. And the heads of the people who were there are the least reliable archive going.
A website keeps what happened. A magazine also keeps what people thought it meant at the time. Those are different things, and the second is the first to disappear when nobody prints it.
There is something you only see with two covers side by side. In 2005, issue 14 led with «Xpecial Fotografia». In 2020, issue 78 was called «The Water: Photography Issue». Fifteen years apart, the design does not share a single line, and the obsession is exactly the same. This is why magazines like this last: they change everything except what they believe in.
ONFIRE is a Surf Booking partner.