Wavegarden Just One-Upped Itself
With 62 modules, new bathymetry, and financial backing from Gabriel Medina, Beyond The Club is their best yet.
Gabriel Medina ain’t just gonna invest in any old wave pool.
If the 3x Champ is putting his hard-earned on the line, the place ought to be remarkable.
And it’s quite apparent that the new Wavegarden location in São Paulo, Brazil, is exactly that. Frankly, it has one of the best air sections we’ve seen. And we’ll get into the details about how Gabe might get his coin back, but let’s talk about what makes the pool pop.
Some facts:
-It has 62 modules — more than any Wavegarden pool in the world.
-It’s got over 25 wave settings.
-It can create 200 and 250 premium-quality waves per hour.
-You can get 11-second barrels.
-And you’ve got nine seconds from takeoff to ramp.
That last bit means you have noticeably more time to pump than any other pool we’ve seen. But don’t take our word for it, watch Filipe here.
The lagoon itself is 28,000 square meters and has a wall length of 160 meters, which makes it the largest Wavegarden pool in the world. But it’s not the size of the boat — it’s the motion of the non-ocean. The modules are the main reason why this pool stands out, but the new bathymetry adds to it. They tweaked the geometry, slopes, and depth of the reef to make the waves do exactly what the engineers had in mind.
The pool is part of a facility called Beyond The Clubs, which includes a 78-room hotel, nine restaurants, a surf academy, surf shop, courts for beach tennis, tennis, padel, and squash, a 2,000 m² gym, a skate park designed by professional skater Bob Burnquist, spa, physiotherapy center, beauty salon, wine cellar, jazz bar, and a nightclub.
Right now, lifetime memberships are going for R$770,000.00 or just over USD$130k. Membership also covers your spouse, your kids if they’re under 30, and your folks if they’re over 70. If you want in, you’ll also have to pay R$2,300 or USD$400 per month for maintenance.
A place for the everyman? Not exactly. But if you’re gonna amass exorbitant amounts of wealth, ya might as well do something like this rather than join some stuffy golf club.
The place cost R$1.1 billion to build, which is about $200M in USD. They’re hoping to sell 3000 memberships, which would pull in just shy of $400M USD. São Paulo is home to approximately 12M heads, so they’re betting that .025% of them are in.
And Gabriel Medina is amongst the bettors. He invested in the place, and has been involved from the early days all the way through the build. Now that they’re pumping waves out, it’s the first we’ve seen of Gabe in the water since he tore his pectoral muscle in early January.
Beyond The Club is Brazil’s fourth wave pool. The nation has seen success with the private pool model thus far, but this is the first one that isn’t directly attached to a real estate play.
Sure does sound nice.
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