There are places that don't make the list. No influencer swarm. No overpriced cocktail bars. No perfectly curated grid waiting to document your arrival. Lobitos, Peru is one of those places — a remote fishing and surf village on the country's northern coast, sitting at one of the most westerly points of the Pacific in South America. You really do feel like you're standing on the edge of the world.
Getting here requires intention. Which is, of course, why the people who make it tend to stay.
Jenna is one of them. A former tech professional who moved from New York City to Lobitos in 2024, she is now the co-founder of La Onza — a café, surf space, and community experiences company that has quietly become the heart of this small village. She lives in a 150-year-old beach house with a rescue dog named Coco, surfs twice a day when the conditions allow, and describes the decision to leave her career behind with a kind of clarity that makes you question your own life choices.
A place with an unlikely past
Lobitos was not built for surfers. It was built for oil. In the late 19th century, a British company established a petroleum colony on this stretch of northern Peruvian coastline — roads, a church, a hospital, and what is believed to be South America's first cinema. The town boomed through the 1920s and '30s, then changed hands before Peru's military nationalized the oilfields in 1968. By 2005, the military had wound down, and the place was nearly empty.
Then the surfers found it. The Victorian mansions that once housed British oil executives now shelter traveling wave-chasers. Old wooden structures, protected by national legislation since 2008 as cultural heritage, line sandy streets beside the Pacific. The oil rigs are still visible offshore, which gives the whole scene a quietly cinematic quality: desert meets ocean meets ghost town meets some of the best surf in South America.
And beneath all of it, something older still. Peru has a legitimate claim to being the birthplace of surfing. The Moche and Chimú cultures of northern Peru were riding waves on caballitos de totora — woven reed vessels — as far back as 3,000 years ago. Spanish conquistadors named them 'little reed horses.' Fishermen still use them today. In 2013, the nearby town of Huanchaco was designated a World Surfing Reserve in recognition of this history. As Jenna puts it: "Peruvians will proudly tell you surfing started here, and they have a pretty compelling case."
What La Onza actually is
La Onza resists easy categorization, which is part of what makes it worth knowing about. It is a café, yes — one that serves waffles and iced americanos to salty, stoked surfers at 9AM. But it is also a community anchor, a retreat host, and what Jenna calls a vehicle for responsible tourism.
"We believe that travel should give back more than it takes," she says. "It's a real problem when small artisanal communities are put on the map by tourism, and the locals get cut out of any development." La Onza's approach is deliberate: meals at locally owned restaurants, meet and greets at local artist studios, local staff, local supply chains. By the end of a retreat week, guests are on a first-name basis with the community — and in Lobitos, first names mean something. "We don't say hi here," Jenna explains. "We yell each other's names."
The centerpiece of every retreat is something Jenna borrowed from her previous life in the startup world: the Dolphin Tank. Over an epic dinner with NGO leaders, instead of poking holes in ideas like a Shark Tank, guests are asked to think about what value they can bring. Who in their network might help? What resources can they share? What introduction might unlock a solution? "As much as this helps local projects, the sense of self-worth and empowerment it imparts on our guests is the real phenomenon," she says. The results have been tangible: thousands of dollars raised for Waves for Development's surf therapy programs, engineers connected with climate-focused NGO EcoSwell, and a new multi-year photojournalism initiative for the young women of Lobitos, funded in partnership with Coast2Coast's Women and Water.
This is not a retreat brand selling transformation. It is a small operation doing genuinely hard community work, surfing twice a day, and somehow making it look like the best possible version of a life.
On learning to surf at 40
Jenna's relationship with the ocean is newer than you might expect. She learned to surf two years ago, just before turning 40 — after a life that included competitive basketball, half marathons, and a rave and festival era in London and New York that she describes with zero apology.
"When I got to Lobitos and stood in front of the waves, on these long, empty, white sandy beaches, I was absolutely mesmerized," she says. "This is one of the most westerly points you can get to on the Pacific coast in South America — you really feel like you're standing on the edge of the world. The ocean called me to her waves."
Four weeks after catching her first wave, she turned down what she describes as her dream job in New York City. She has no interest in making that sound dramatic. For her, it was obvious: "I think when you find something that really gets to the core of what you want, any sort of excuses or thoughts that can sometimes hold you back just tune out."
She still wipes out. She still forgets things (fins, once, famously). She wouldn't trade any of it.
Why it matters that places like this still exist
There is something genuinely rare about Lobitos. Not the waves, though those are exceptional, long, consistent lefts that have earned the region serious credibility. Not the history, though that is wilder than most people know. What is rare is the specific quality of a place that has not yet been consumed by its own appeal. Where the morning light hits the water and the only sound is the lineup, and someone is yelling your name from across the beach because that's just how it works here.
La Onza exists to protect that. To make sure that as more people find their way to Lobitos (and they will) the community that was already there comes out ahead.
"I caught my first wave in Lobitos," Jenna says, "and four weeks later, turned down my dream job in New York City to open a café and travel company in a remote surf village on the coast of Peru."
Some things are hard to explain. Some decisions are perfectly clear.
La Onza is based in Lobitos, Peru. See more of their retreat experiences @laonza.lobitos
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