Australia started the modern surf park era when URBNSURF Melbourne opened in 2020, and URBNSURF Sydney gave the east coast a second pool in 2024. Western Australia, home to Margaret River and arguably the country's heaviest surf culture, has watched all of it from four time zones away. That wait is finally ending. On April 2, construction crews broke ground on Perth Surf Park in Jandakot, and the machine going in the ground is a monster.
The biggest Cove yet
The centerpiece is a 62-module Wavegarden Cove, tying it with Beyond the Club in São Paulo for the largest Cove ever built, and making it comfortably Australia's biggest wave pool. For scale, that is ten more modules than the 52-module systems at DSRT Surf in California. More modules mean a longer paddle-out, longer rides, and more zones running different waves at the same time, from whitewater rollers to the slabby expert settings the Cove family is known for at places like Alaia Bay and The Wave Bristol.
The lagoon covers about 5.4 acres and the operators are planning for up to a million visitors a year. The project has been reported at around 120 million Australian dollars, with institutional backing from the Royal Automobile Club of WA alongside longtime partner Wyllie Group. Local officials have called it the largest private tourism investment Western Australia has seen in more than two decades, and Aventuur chair Andrew Ross has described it as the first major new tourism attraction delivered in Perth in over 25 years.
A wave you can catch the train to
The site sits on Prinsep Road in Jandakot, hard against the Kwinana Freeway and a short walk from Cockburn Central station, about 20 minutes south of the Perth CBD. A world-class wave with its own train stop is a sentence that still feels strange to type, but it follows the same logic as Sydney's pool near Olympic Park: put the wave where the people already are.
Around the lagoon, the plans go well past surfing. A high-performance surf academy, a members' clubhouse, a wellness and recovery studio, a skate park and pump track, a Rip Curl flagship store, bars and restaurants, an events lawn, and rooftop glamping for anyone determined to sleep next to the wave. Aventuur expects more than 280 jobs during construction and around 100 full-time roles once the park is running.
The honest timeline
First waves are expected in spring 2027, which in Australian terms means roughly September to November of next year, with the public opening to follow later in 2027. That is a long runway, and we say this in every construction story because it keeps being true: surf park timelines slip. What this project has going for it is that the money is institutional, the ground is actually broken, and Wavegarden has now built enough Coves worldwide that the construction playbook is well worn. Of all the announced pools in Australia, this is the one furthest along.
Why Perth, of all places
Fair question, given Western Australia has some of the best ocean waves on Earth. The answer is that almost none of them are in Perth. The metro beaches at Trigg and Scarborough are fickle wind-swell spots, and Margaret River is a three-hour drive south. A city of more than two million surf-mad people with mediocre local waves is close to the ideal surf park market, which is exactly why Aventuur picked it as the first project in its pipeline. The company holds exclusive Wavegarden rights across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Fiji, and North America, with an Auckland park targeting late 2027 and a Jacksonville, Florida project expected to start construction this year.
The Auckland project, as an aside, is worth watching for one detail: the lagoon there is set to be heated with waste heat from an on-site data centre powered by a seven-hectare solar farm. If that works, it answers the energy criticism that follows this industry everywhere.
For now, the news is simpler and better than any of that. One of the biggest wave pools on Earth is out of the renderings and into the dirt, and by late 2027 the most isolated major city in the world should have the most convenient wave in it. WA's surfers have waited long enough.
Rendering courtesy of Aventuur.
