The indoor surf park that slipped past you
We usually reserve surf park announcements for the official dates they are live but this wave pool in Brazil needs to be on your radar
We usually reserve surf park announcements for the official dates they are live but this one is interesting enough that we couldn’t wait to talk about it. It may have slipped past you—the hype of Atlantic Park in Virginia Beach is almost overshadowing one of the world’s most innovative surf parks: Surf Center, Brazil’s first indoor wave pool. Launching soon!
A heated, indoor wave pool
Surfing is by and large a warm weather sport. Even at the most popular surf breaks around the world crowds thin out during colder seasons despite the waves sometimes being best during that time of year. Surf park locations considered warm all year like Texas and Southern California are no exception. They have an off-season during which their revenues drop along with the temperature.
Surf Center is an indoor surf park with a heated wave pool. They can operate all year round without being affected by weather to the degree of their outdoor counterparts. Although this sounds like a dream come true, indoor surf parks have been anticlimactic to date because of their inability to produce impressive waves. While Atlantic Park’s outdoor Wavegarden generates 1,000 waves per hour as high as six feet tall, Surf Center’s GT3K only produces 240 three foot waves per hour. Nonetheless, Surf Center is a huge step up from the status quo of indoor wave pools with its air sections and tiny barrels.
The price of private waves
The biggest downside to Surf Center is that it is private. At $10,000 up front plus $2,400 annually it is cost prohibitive for most and yet it is the most affordable private surf park in Brazil. Despite the fact that the public model reigns supreme in the global surf park industry, Brazil only has one public surf parks of the five total currently open. It is the only country with more private than public surf parks.
One case for privatization is that exclusivity allows developers to charge higher prices for a luxury experience at the park and for real estate surrounding the park. When the cost to build is very high to begin with, charging fewer people sky-high prices may pay off more efficiently than opening the park to the public. This was certainly the case with other private surf parks in Brazil like Praia da Grama. As Oscar Segall of KSM Realty put it in an interview with Wavepoolmag, “In all my years as a project developer, I have never seen the value of lots escalate as much as we have seen at Praia da Grama”.
Light at the end of the tube
The private nature of Surf Center is made worse by the phenomenal footage they shared from their soft opening in early September. Clips of “alley-oops” above the lip and kids catching their first waves show the potential of indoor wave pools for surfers of all kinds. Fortunately, the park has offered to open their doors to the public for one day on October 4th. Our hope is that they continue this trend consistently and ideally increase it, perhaps creating more of a hybrid model in which they provide both private and public offerings.
About the author
Val S. K. is a surf industry researcher from Boston, Massachusetts. After studying computing as an undergrad and graduate student at Cornell University, Val worked as a software and data engineer across many industries. Working remotely enabled her to feed her obsession with surfing by traveling the world to famous ocean breaks and newly launched surf parks. When she’s not in the water or watching WSL, she regularly publishes research through her company Surflytics and maintains the largest free database of surf parks in the world on her website surfparkdb.com.