In this paper, we study edge-transitive surfaces, i.e. triangulated 2-dimensional manifolds whose automorphism groups act transitively on the edges of these triangulated surfaces. We show that there exist four types of edge-transitive surfaces, splitting up further into a total of five sub-types. We exploit our theoretical results to compute a census of edge-transitive surfaces with up to 5000 faces by constructing suitable cycle double covers of edge-transitive cubic graphs.