Giovanni Canestri can recite the details with precision, even now, eleven years later. April 12, 2015. He was in Courchevel, closing out the season at his nightclub, when phone calls and the cries of his older son Téo jolted him awake in the early hours. His wife was calling from Reunion, where the family lived, with news that would shatter his world: Elio, their younger son, was dead. The thirteen-year-old, a passionate surfer and promising young talent in the sport, had entered the dangerous and forbidden waters at Aigrettes. A bull shark attacked him fatally.
“Brilliant, mischievous, passionate: I wonder every day what he would have become,” Canestri says quietly in his home at Petit-Piquey, a place where his family has gathered many times over the years.
Now sixty-five, Canestri spent twelve years, from 2000 to 2012, as owner of the Centaure nightclub at Cap Ferret, operating beneath the Forestière complex. “The best period of my life,” he reflects. “Top-notch equipment, a dream clientele, everyone was there.”
The family had already been living in Reunion for a decade when Elio died, with both sons immersed in surf culture from childhood. His mother worked as a speech therapist; his father divided his time between the island and mainland France, pursuing various hospitality ventures. The loss sent shockwaves through Reunion, the Cap Ferret peninsula, and the Basque Coast, where Elio had spent considerable time.
Canestri returned to Cap Ferret in the summer of 2015 to thank the countless people who had expressed their sympathy and support. What followed was more than a decade of sustained public engagement in Reunion, driven by a single purpose: to prevent such tragedies from happening again. Since 2011, the island had experienced a series of fatal shark attacks, sparking fierce debates among wildlife advocates, government authorities, and families of victims. Canestri founded an association bearing his son’s name and began advocating for all ocean users, not only surfers.
“I mobilized myself for swimmers of all kinds, but also for the territory’s economy,” he explains. “This is already a socially fragile department, and these tragedies, beyond the suffering of families, damaged its appeal.” He threw himself into every discussion and debate: selective shark removal, nets, moored buoys with connectivity, sonar systems, infrared scanning technology. His engagement was relentless, spanning media appearances and the creation of the Elio Surf Challenge, an event combining practice sessions with public awareness.
The politics, he found, were rarely straightforward. “Even though I’m not left-wing, I have to recognize that the Hollande government was the most receptive,” he says with a slight smile. “Over the years, I understood that political games sometimes took priority over the actual issues.” He remains critical of what he calls “so-called environmentalists who came after me, some without any real knowledge of the Reunion situation.” Yet he credits genuine progress: the island has experienced no shark attack deaths in the past five years.
“We were the first to get young surfers back in the water safely,” he insists.
Two years ago, Canestri stepped back from the fight that had consumed so much of his energy. “I feel fatigue now, the sense of being heard less and less. And the current system sometimes feels like a band-aid on a wooden leg.”
Today, life continues in different ways. His older son Téo works as a surf instructor at the Sailfish beach this season. His younger daughter, recently qualified as a physical therapist, is working a summer job at the Dunes hotel. His wife Sylvie remains in Saint-Gilles, ten thousand kilometers from the peninsula, working through the summer. “We return here more and more regularly, where I have many friends, where the setting is quite magical, no one would dispute that,” Canestri says. “Elio would have loved to grow up here too.”
In Reunion, a surf club now bears Elio’s name, a permanent memorial to a life cut short. Meanwhile, Canestri has channeled his entrepreneurial energy into a new project: a padel complex in Lège-Cap-Ferret. Five courts, a dedicated school, and high-level facilities to complement existing offerings at the Claouey tennis club. The location remains undisclosed as he seeks financial partners, but the venture marks a return to the business world that once defined his life, before grief and duty called him toward something larger. Whether the island he fought for so long will sustain the safety gains of recent years, without the advocates who pushed hardest for them, is a question Reunion’s ocean users may yet have to answer.