Shopping
Last updated
A 220-acre marina and entertainment complex on the Intracoastal Waterway, with a 112-foot Ferris wheel and an amphitheatre behind it.
Photo: NASAPublic domain
The Wharf is not an old harbour district that gently became a shopping street. It was conceived, designed and opened as one project in May 2006, on around 220 acres of ground beside the Intracoastal Waterway in Orange Beach, and everything you walk past was placed there on purpose by someone with a site plan. There is no point pretending otherwise, and there is also no point holding it against the place.
What it does, it does well. A family two days into a beach rental, with sunburn and a forecast of thunderstorms, needs somewhere to go that is not the condominium. The Wharf supplies roughly sixty shops, restaurants and entertainment businesses arranged along a pedestrian main street, a cinema, an arcade, a zipline and adventure course, and a Ferris wheel that at 112 feet with twenty-four enclosed gondolas is among the tallest in the Southeast. Nothing there requires sand, sun or a boat.
Behind the shops is the part that is not manufactured at all. The marina runs to around 228 slips on the waterway, and it is a real working basin: sportfishing boats, charter operations, transient traffic moving along the Intracoastal, fuel docks, people cleaning fish. Walking the docks in the late afternoon while boats come in is the most interesting free thing here, and almost nobody does it because they are all in the shops.
The amphitheatre is the other reason people come. It opened with the development in 2006, seats just under ten thousand, and pulls touring acts across the summer that are considerably larger than a town of nine thousand residents would otherwise see.
Be realistic about price and character. This is resort retail: mostly chains, mostly marked up, and busiest exactly when the weather is worst.
The Wharf sits on Canal Road (Highway 180) on the north side of Orange Beach, beside the Intracoastal Waterway, about a mile and a half inland from the beach road.
From the beach, take Highway 161 north to Canal Road and turn east, or come along Canal Road from Gulf Shores, which avoids the coastal traffic entirely and is usually the quicker of the two in summer.
From Foley and the north, Highway 59 south then east on Canal Road. From Pensacola, cross at Perdido Pass and work north.
Parking has been free in large surface lots, which is one of the main practical advantages over anywhere on the beach road. On concert nights those lots fill and the approach roads back up badly, so arrive early or come another evening.
Arriving by boat is possible and common; the marina takes transient traffic along the waterway.
This is the single most useful thing The Wharf does for a visitor, and it is worth knowing before the sky goes dark.
Two honest caveats. Everybody else on the Alabama coast has the same idea when it rains, so the car parks and the restaurants fill fast on a wet day in July. And there is a genuine gap between the things that are free to look at and the things that cost money; a family can get through a surprising amount of budget here in three hours without eating a meal.
Parking has been free and plentiful, which is the quiet reason this works better than the beach road on a busy day.
Walk past the shops towards the water and the character changes. The basin holds something in the region of 228 slips on the Intracoastal Waterway, and unlike the main street it was not designed to be looked at.
What is tied up there on a given afternoon tells you what kind of coast this is. Offshore sportfishermen with towers and outriggers. Charter boats loading ice. Cruising boats working their way along the waterway between Florida and Louisiana, stopping for fuel and a night. Occasionally something very large that is passing through and does not belong to anybody local.
The best hour is late afternoon, when boats come back in. Fish get weighed and cleaned, pelicans and herons position themselves for the scraps with total confidence, and crews talk about what the water was doing thirty miles out. It costs nothing and it is the most Alabama-coast thing available inside a shopping development.
Charter and cruise operators work from here as well as from the marinas behind the beach road, which makes The Wharf a plausible departure point for a dolphin cruise or a bay trip if you happen to be staying on the north side of Orange Beach. The Intracoastal location means these boats reach the Gulf through Perdido Pass like everyone else, so an offshore trip from here starts with a run east.
Dock walking is public and welcome. Boarding somebody's boat is not.
The venue seats just under ten thousand and has been running since the development opened in 2006, which on this coast makes it the main reason a nationally touring act ever comes to Baldwin County.
Two things follow for a visitor who is not going to the show.
Traffic. On a concert night, Canal Road and the approaches to The Wharf carry a load they were not built for, and a family heading out for dinner at seven can lose forty minutes to it. Check whether anything is on before you plan an evening on this side of town.
Accommodation. Concert weekends compress availability and lift rates across Orange Beach, in a market that is already seasonal. If you are booking a summer week and the dates look unusually expensive, an event is often the reason.
For a visitor who is going: it is an outdoor venue on the Gulf Coast in summer, which means heat until well after sunset and a real chance of a storm delay. Lawn seating is exposed. Bag policies are strict and change, and the parking is large but empties slowly.
Outside the touring season, the site runs smaller free events, seasonal light displays and markets, which are worth checking for precisely because they are not advertised outside the immediate area.
Straight-line distances, so allow more on the road — the island is long and has one main parkway.
Alabama's other beach city: nine thousand people, a maze of back bays and the only cut from those bays to open Gulf water.
3–10 hoursFree to visit. Beach parking is charged at both city and state park accesses.2.7 mi away
The only gap in thirty-two miles of Alabama barrier coast, armoured with granite, and the wrong place to let anyone swim.
1–3 hoursFree to visit. Parking at the adjoining Gulf State Park beach accesses is charged per vehicle per day.3.4 mi away
A state park beach access with an Orange Beach address, which means state parking rules, not city ones, and a 1920s name nobody explains.
1.5–5 hoursFree to walk on. Parking is the Gulf State Park flat daily vehicle rate, recently around $15.2.2 mi away
A free bayside park with a four-hundred-foot fishing pier, seven picnic shelters and the best playground on the Alabama coast.
1–4 hoursFree. No entry charge, no parking charge, no kiosk.1.9 mi away
Where this place fits into a day, and the pages that plan one.
Alabama has about thirty-two miles of coast. That is the whole of it, from the Florida line at Perdido Pass west along Orange Beach and Gulf Shores…
Almost everyone who books a holiday on Alabama's coast has the same moment of confusion, usually about two weeks out, usually while looking at a…
Calling something family friendly in Gulf Shores tells you nothing. Practically every visitor here is a family, most of them in a rented condo with…
Alabama's coast never grew a town centre. Gulf Shores developed around a crossroads where a highway met the sand, Orange Beach was a fishing…
Two things are true about this page and they pull in opposite directions. Gulf Shores is an outdoor destination with a genuinely thin list of indoor…
This coast has four distinct populations across the year and they barely overlap. Working out which one you want to be in the middle of is most of the decision.
9 min readBrandi Cochran
Two cities, one beach, eight miles apart, with a state park in between. The sand is identical and the weather is identical, so the choice comes down to whether your week has a boat in it.
8 min readBrandi Cochran
Nearly every rental on this coast turns over on a Saturday, which means the week has a shape whether you plan one or not. Here is the shape, and how to stop it costing you two days.
9 min readYvonne Ramsey
It stands 112 feet with twenty-four enclosed gondolas, which makes it one of the tallest in the Southeast. Because the cars are enclosed it keeps running in weather that shuts the beach, which is part of why The Wharf is the standard wet-afternoon plan on this coast. The view takes in the Intracoastal Waterway, the marina and a good stretch of Orange Beach; dusk is the ride worth queuing for.
Walking around is free and so has the parking been, which is not something you can say about much else in Orange Beach in July. The Ferris wheel, the cinema, the arcade, the zipline and adventure courses and the amphitheatre concerts are all ticketed separately by their own operators. The most interesting free thing on the site is the marina at the back, particularly in the late afternoon when boats come in.
This is what it is for. There is a multi-screen cinema, an arcade, around sixty shops and restaurants along a covered pedestrian street, and a Ferris wheel whose gondolas are enclosed and therefore keep turning. The catch is that every family on the Alabama coast reaches the same conclusion at the same time, so the car parks and restaurants fill quickly on a wet day in the summer season.
Just under ten thousand, and it has been operating since the development opened in 2006. That capacity is why nationally touring acts play a town of around nine thousand residents at all. If you are not going to a show, check the schedule anyway: concert nights load Canal Road heavily and push accommodation rates up across Orange Beach for the weekend.