Surf Snowdonia

Surf Snowdonia is Part of Adventure Park Snowdonia

A World-First Inland Surf Lagoon

Surf Snowdonia is a world-first inland surf lagoon – the perfect destination for anyone looking for safe, fun, guaranteed surfable waves. You’ll find us in the heart of beautiful North Wales, where our magnificent man-made waves roll against a backdrop of mountains, forests and farmland.

With expert tuition available from our friendly surf academy, this is the perfect environment to learn how to surf, fast-track your skills and have loads of fun on your board. Waves roll every 90 seconds. Surf in beginner, intermediate and advanced zones.

An Introduction to Surf Snowdonia

Picture this. A perfect lozenge-shaped lagoon roughly the size of six football pitches, set in the lush green Conwy Valley in North Wales, in the lee of the mountains of Snowdonia. Breathe it in. It’s clean, it’s fresh, it’s wild and it’s beautiful. Now add something a little bit special and entirely unexpected. A two-metre-high barrelling wave that starts at the centre of the lagoon, peels perfectly for more than 150 metres and then dissipates softly as it hits the shore.

Surf Snowdonia is a genuinely revolutionary outdoor adventure destination which produces the longest man-made surfable waves on the planet. It’s a showcase for the first-ever publicly accessible Wavegarden® surfing lagoon and is almost certainly the world’s most hotly anticipated outdoor adventure destination for 2015.

It is a game-changing facility. Surf Snowdonia will use unique wave-generating engineering and technology to produce powerful and consistent surfing waves of varying heights up to 2 metres, in a 300m long lagoon. Simultaneously. And all at the push of a button.

A Bit About the Technology

The unique concept behind Surf Snowdonia has been developed over the last ten years by Wavegarden: a group of hydrological, civil and mechanical engineers who also happen to be passionate surfers. Based in northern Spain, Wavegarden is the global leader in the design and manufacture of wave generation systems. Theirs is a completely revolutionary technology.

At the push of a button, the facility generates perfectly formed barrelling waves which will interact with contours on the bed of the lagoon to provide different wave profiles at different points in the lagoon. The waves are variously 2m, 1.2m and 70cm high, and will peel for up to 150 metres. They are generated at a rate of one every minute.

From the expert central area of the lagoon, two identical waves break simultaneously left and right with barrelling point-break type rides up to 20 seconds long. Once the waves reach the beginners’ area at each end of the lagoon, the left and right-hand waves transform into smaller more playful whitewater waves, the perfect size for all ages to learn and improve their skills. The Surf Snowdonia Wavegarden has room for up to 36 surfers at a time.

Surf Snowdonia is set in the village of Dolgarrog on a former industrial site – an aluminium rolling and casting works once owned by global aluminium giant Alcoa. The factory opened in 1907 and went into liquidation a hundred years later in 2007. Surf Snowdonia is just 7 miles from the main A55 North Wales arterial route, Liverpool and Manchester city centres are only 1.5 hours’ drive away.

(Photos © Pete Chamberlain).