South Carolina is getting a surf park. Myrtle Beach City Council approved the agreement on 22 September, which clears the last major hurdle for a 5.5-acre Wavegarden Cove at Broadway at the Beach.
For a state with 187 miles of coastline and famously inconsistent surf, a machine that turns out a set every ninety seconds changes the proposition entirely.
The wave
A Wavegarden Cove is the platform running at The Wave in Bristol, Lost Shore in Scotland and Atlantic Park in Virginia Beach, and it is the most widely installed surf lagoon in the world.
The layout is a central pier with waves peeling down both sides at once, which means two groups can surf simultaneously at different settings. A Cove can run a soft, rolling reform for a first lesson on one side and an overhead barrel section on the other, switching between more than twenty configurations through the day. At full tilt the platform produces up to around a thousand waves an hour.
Module count for Myrtle Beach has not been announced yet, and that number is what determines the lagoon's real capacity, so the specifics of the wave menu are still to come.
The rest of it
The lagoon anchors a $170 million development on 28 acres at the corner of Highway 17 Bypass and 21st Avenue North, on the site of the old Palace Theatre. Alongside it: a 150-room hotel, restaurants and bars, retail, and additional hospitality space.
The location does a lot of work here. Broadway at the Beach is already Myrtle Beach's main inland entertainment district, with an aquarium, restaurants and a Ferris wheel, and it sits about a mile back from the ocean. A surfer visiting for a session lands in the middle of somewhere that already works, rather than a construction site with a lagoon in it.
The developer is WGMB, or WaveGarden Myrtle Beach, a partnership of Highgate, South Street Partners, Twin Point Capital and W.M. Jordan, on land owned by Broadway at the Beach's owner Burroughs and Chapin.
W.M. Jordan is an encouraging name on that list. They built Atlantic Park in Virginia Beach, which is the closest thing the United States has to a finished version of this model, so the team has done it once already on this coast.
Why it is real now
The city is supporting the project with up to $20 million, and the structure is worth a line because it tells you something about the timeline.
None of that money moves until the developer has invested at least $125 million and the project is 80 percent built. The agreement also sets dates: construction must begin by 1 September 2027, and the development must open by 1 July 2030. The stated target is March 2030.
In other words, the deal is written around a finished park rather than an announced one, which is a reasonable thing to want after a decade of this project looking for the right site. It started around 2016 at a different location and moved to Broadway at the Beach in 2024.
Good to Know
March 2030 is a long way out, and opening dates in this industry move. The contractual deadline of July 2030 is the firmer of the two numbers.
Nothing is bookable and no pricing has been announced. For a sense of what a Cove session costs elsewhere, our price guide covers every open park with published rates.
If you want waves on this coast sooner, Atlantic Park is open now in Virginia Beach, about a four-hour drive north, and Jacksonville is targeting 2028. Those three would be the East Coast's Wavegarden Coves. We track all of them in the directory and the opening tracker.
