If you’ve watched the HBO series “100 Foot Wave,” you’re familiar with the Portuguese town of Nazaré. If you haven’t, check out this video. The second season is streaming now.

As longtime HBO subscribers, my wife Mary Pat and I watched the first season with interest. The notion of anyone being brave, or foolhardy, enough to attempt to ride waves as tall as 10-story buildings is mind-bending. But the very fact that such waves can be found off the coast of Portugal is hard to accept, too.

Portugal, really? Waves bigger than those in Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, South Africa or California? How can this be?

Curious to find an answer to this question, and anxious to see the spot where surfers from around the world annually congregate in winter, we included Nazaré on the list of places we wanted to visit during our trek in May of southern Spain and Portugal (which I have been recounting here on Going Mobile).

After two nights in Porto, we arranged for a van to take us and our friends, Ann and Matt, to nearby Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport (we needed a van to handle the four of us and all our baggage). That’s where we picked up a rental car that I would end up driving from Porto the entire 370-plus miles to Portugal’s extreme southwestern corner – and then the 200-plus miles back to Lisbon.

(Note about driving in Portugal: As it was in Spain, the major roads in Portugal are easy to negotiate and better maintained than many of the roads in Washington, Idaho or Oregon. And since the main highways require a toll, paying in advance at the car-rental center allows you to avoid having to stop every several miles.)

Based on the advice of our van driver, we took a detour on our way to Nazaré to visit the coastal town of Aveiro, famed for its canals full of colorful boats. But after searching in vain for a parking spot, hot and hungry, we decided simply to press on. Which is how we arrived at Nazaré in mid-afternoon.

Mary Pat, who served as our able travel coordinator, had booked us rooms at the Hotel Magic. Centrally located, just a short walk from the beach, the hotel proved to be everything we wanted – including, and most important, air-conditioned. An employee named Carla even helped me find the parking garage and then guided me as I wedged the rental car into a cramped corner.

Then it was time to find a place to get drink and food. This, though, proved to be difficult as most every eatery in Nazaré closes down between 3 and 7 p.m. We finally found an open pastelería at which we could get coffee and tea, sodas and some tasty sausage rolls, sit in the shade and simply enjoy the moment.

This comes straight from my travel journal: “Nazaré is a typical beach town. The lower part is where our hotel sits amid a maze of narrow streets that wind up the hill from the town’s wide sandy beach. The main drag that runs along the water features a collection of shops and eateries catering to the tourists that have been gathering here since the place achieved fame as a big-wave surfing destination.”

What we would discover is that the upper part of the town, in the Sitio neighborhood, is near where crowds gather to watch the surfing season at the Fort of São Miguel Arcanjo, which is both a lighthouse and a museum. Winter is when the waves are at their height, and it was during 2011 when an American big-wave surfer named Garrett McNamara began things when he set a world record by riding a 78-foot wave.

As a Guardian reporter would write in 2020, “Winter used to be dead in Nazaré: many restaurants wouldn’t even bother to open.” But, he added, “the wave – sometimes known as Big Mama – has changed that.” With the town now busy year-round, some 40,000 people gathered at the fort in 2014. Five years later, that number had risen to 335,000.

The town’s year-round business certainly benefited us. After our late lunch, modest as it was, we walked along the beach, drifting in and out of the various souvenir shops. When we found the alley where a restaurant that Mary Pat had read about was located, called Maria do Mar. We fortuitously bumped into the owner who not only was happy to take our reservation request but eager to share with us the significance of the restaurant’s name: It was the title of Portugal’s first talking picture, and Maria was the given name of the owner’s mother.

We returned a few hours later and joined the crowd of people sitting in the outdoor tables set up along the alley. And while the dinner we were served wasn’t the best meal of the trip (the fish I shared with Mary Pat had too many bones), the service was – typical of our experience in Portugal – superior, and the wine was cold. At least mine was.

Later, back at the hotel, I read in the Rick Steves guidebook about what to expect the next day when we planned to visit the upper neighborhood of Sitio and the big-wave viewpoint.

“In 1912 the entire area had grown so much that Sitio merged with a neighboring village (Perderneira) and the beach folks (Praia)  to make Nazaré,” the guidebook told me. “Take the funicular up to the top for a spectacular view and the exquisitely decorated village church.”

Then I lay back as the air-conditioning washed over me, and visions of huge waves and fearless athletes riding down their steep slopes lulled me toward sleep.

Up next: Where the big waves reside.