Getaria-Zarautz Open Water Swim 2026

The Getaria-Zarautz Open Water Swim is, without exaggeration, one of the most established open-water races on the Basque coast: the rulebook itself mentions at least 53 editions having taken place, making it an event with decades of history along the Gipuzkoa coastline, long before open-water swimming became popular as a discipline elsewhere in Spain. In fact, the organisers reward that loyalty in an unusual way: any swimmer who has won one of the 51 editions receives an automatic invitation to future races, and those who reach 25 or 50 editions swum are given a commemorative fabric cap as recognition for a lifetime spent swimming this course.The 2,850-metre route connects two of the prettiest coastal towns in Gipuzkoa: it starts at the port of Getaria, the fishing village dominated by "El Ratón" (the rocky silhouette jutting into the sea that gives Getaria's hill its name), and finishes by swimming across to Zarautz beach, where the final metres are completed running across the sand to the finish line. It's, in a sense, a swim from town to town across the Bay of Biscay, something few swimming events in Spain can offer with such a recognisable setting.One of the most curious aspects of this race is its colour-coded start system: instead of a single mass start, swimmers are grouped into up to nine waves based on their accredited time (or their experience, for first-timers), each wearing a different coloured cap — gold for those under 40 minutes, silver for 40-45, bronze and orange for 45-50, and so on down to the red group, reserved for those over an hour or swimming the race for the first time — with staggered starts every 7 minutes. Only the first five groups must provide official proof of times from previous editions (2023, 2024, or 2025), or from pool swimming events (800-1,500m) or open-water races (3,000m or more); everyone else can register freely. The system is designed above all for safety: it prevents hundreds of swimmers of very different levels from sharing the water at the same moment, which is critical in an open-sea event without constant resting buoys.The day's logistics are also carefully managed given this is a "town-to-town" event: since the start and finish are in different towns, the organisers run free buses from Zarautz to the starting point in Getaria (from 9:00am to 11:30am, with the exception that gold, silver, and bronze caps must catch the bus before 10:30am or risk missing their start), and the bag-drop service operates at both ports with a system of vans assigned by cap colour, each with its own bag-collection deadline. Anyone completing both the Getaria-Zarautz and the Zarautz-Mollarri-Zarautz (the sister 5,000m course, part of the Spanish Open Water Championship) can take advantage of a special combined price of 80€, regardless of when they register.On the competitive side, there's serious prize money for those competing in the "internal league" combining both crossings (1,500€ for the overall winner), trophies for the top three in each category and gender, and a very local touch: there's a special prize for the first Zarautz resident (or member of the Zarautz Balea Igeriketa club) and the first Getaria resident to cross the finish line, separate from the general classification — a gesture that recalls this race was born, above all, as a sporting celebration between two neighbouring towns on the Bay of Biscay.