There is a club in Carcavelos that does not teach surfing. Pride Training Club is the second bodyboard club Pride has opened in Portugal, led by Hugo Macatrão, from Nazaré.
September 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Carcavelos is the best-known beach on the Lisbon coast and, more often than not, the first place anyone from Lisbon gets into the sea. It has a train station at the door, a huge stretch of sand and a surf school every hundred metres. So it is worth saying up front what makes this club different from the others: Pride Training Club Carcavelos does not teach surfing. It teaches bodyboarding.
It is the second club Pride has opened in Portugal — the bodyboard brand — and that changes everything else: the equipment, the training, and the way you begin.
The club is led by Hugo Macatrão, coach and athlete. He was born and raised in Nazaré — and in a wave sport, that is not a biographical detail. It is where you learn to read big water before you learn to fear it. Pride themselves describe him as someone who shows up for the best sessions, which is a quiet way of saying he is still a rider and not only a coach.
The method the club commits to is proximity: personalised training, with the coach following each rider rather than running one lesson at the whole group. And there is a line in their own presentation that states the aim better than any marketing promise — they want to be there for the first contact between young people and the sport.
There is one thing bodyboarding does that surfing does not: it puts you riding a wave on day one. There is no standing-up phase, which is where most people spend their first three surf lessons falling. Lying on the board, with fins giving you drive, you catch the wave and you ride it.
That does not make bodyboarding easier — it makes it a sport that gives something back sooner. Anyone arriving at the sea at eight or ten years old, or anyone from inland who has never had a wave under them, feels the difference immediately. The rest — reading the sea, paddling, holding a line on the face, the barrel — takes exactly as long as it takes in anything else.
The club's year splits in two, and each half has its own shape.
In summer, there are classes Monday to Friday, with two sessions a day, alongside other formats — this is the season of the bodyboard holiday programme, where kids spend the day at the beach instead of spending it looking at a screen.
In winter, the club changes people and pace: it runs beginner groups and advanced groups. That is when the sea in Portugal turns serious, and when the real training happens.
Home is Carcavelos. But when the sea does not work there, the club moves: it also trains at Costa da Caparica, Guincho, Praia Grande and Ericeira.
It is worth understanding why, because it says something about the sport. The waves that make a good beginner surf lesson — small, soft, crumbling slowly — are exactly the ones that do not work for bodyboarding. Bodyboarding wants the opposite: waves with a face and some power, the kind Praia Grande and Guincho deliver when the Atlantic comes in. Going to another beach for the right wave is not an extra; for this sport, it is the training.
Pride Training Club Carcavelos is on Surf Booking, in the Cascais area, with Carcavelos beach as its base. You see the club, the forecast for the beach and whatever lessons it has open — and when you book, confirmation is instant and check-in is done by code on the day.