Orange Beach: The Other Half of Alabama's Coast

Alabama has about thirty-two miles of Gulf front, which is less than any other state on this sea. Nearly all of it is covered by two city limits and one state park.

Running west to east: the Fort Morgan peninsula, largely unincorporated and thinly built; the City of Gulf Shores, centred on the junction where Highway 59 meets the beach; Gulf State Park, occupying a substantial block of the middle including the pier and the beach in front of it; the City of Orange Beach, running east from there; and finally Perdido Pass, the jetties, and the Florida line a short distance beyond.

On the ground you cannot see any of it. The sand is the same sand the whole way — fine, pale, almost pure quartz — and the beach road runs straight through with nothing more than a welcome sign to mark the transitions. What changes when you cross a boundary is administrative: the parking system and its rates, the beach patrol, the rental licensing, the ordinances about what may be left on the sand overnight.

The other thing that changes is the back. Drive north off the beach road in Gulf Shores and within a mile you are on the Intracoastal Waterway and then into farmland and pine. Do the same in Orange Beach and you are in an archipelago of bays and bayous, with canals, boat lifts and docks behind a large share of the houses.

That is the whole difference, and every other distinction on this page is downstream of it.

This is the thing Orange Beach has that its neighbour does not, and it is worth understanding as more than a list of names.

Dredging in the 1930s cut the Intracoastal Waterway through the Perdido Bay system, linking Pensacola with Mobile Bay and turning a set of separate shallow bays into one navigable network. Commercial barges came, then the fishing boats, then everything else. Today that network — Terry Cove and Johnson Cove immediately inside the pass, Bayou St. John running east, Cotton Bayou behind the beach, Wolf Bay and Arnica Bay opening out to the north and west — is the reason this town has the boating culture it does.

Wolf Bay deserves particular mention. In April 2007 the state's environmental department classified it an Outstanding Alabama Water, reportedly the first bay in Alabama to hold that designation, which brought tighter water quality and discharge standards with it. It is big, shallow, quiet and a genuinely good place to spend a morning on a paddleboard or a small boat.

For a visitor the bays matter in a specific way: they are the weather insurance. When the Gulf is running hard on a south wind and the beach is under a red flag, the water a mile behind you is flat. Half the activities on this coast that get cancelled at other beach towns simply move inland here.

They are also where a large share of the accommodation sits. A canal-front house in Orange Beach with a dock is an entirely different holiday from a beachfront condominium, and it is generally cheaper per bedroom.

At the eastern end of everything is a cut through the beach with a bridge over it, and it functions as the hinge of this whole coast.

Perdido Pass is the only significant opening between the back bays and the Gulf for the full length of Alabama's shoreline, until you reach the mouth of Mobile Bay some thirty miles west. Every boat that wants to reach open water at this end of the state goes through it. The dredged channel forks under the Highway 182 bridge, one branch heading north into Terry Cove and Johnson Cove, the other east into Bayou St. John, and the bridge itself carries roughly fifty-four feet of clearance over the main channel and about forty-one over the Cotton Bayou side.

The first bridge here opened in 1962, joining Alabama Point on the west side to Florida Point on the east, and it is fair to say it created the modern town. Before it, this end of the coast was reachable only the long way round.

For someone not on a boat, the pass is still one of the best free hours on this coast. There is parking on both sides, rock jetties you can walk out along, fishing from the rocks on a moving tide, and a constant procession of charter boats, rental pontoons and dolphins going by a few yards away. Alabama Point on the west side has beach access as well. The rocks are sharp, slick and uneven, so wear something with grip and keep small children back from the edge where the current runs.

Just beyond the line, on Perdido Key, the Flora-Bama has straddled the Florida-Alabama border since 1964 and is close enough to walk to from the state line parking.

Orange Beach has two waterfronts and they do different jobs.

The Wharf is the purpose-built one: 222 acres on the Intracoastal Waterway, opened in 2006, with a marina, an amphitheatre, a Main Street of shops and restaurants and a 112-foot Ferris wheel carrying twenty-four gondolas. It is where the town put its evening economy. Concerts, tournament weigh-ins, seasonal light displays and a good deal of family noise all happen here, and it is the obvious answer to "what do we do after dinner" on a coast that otherwise has very little of that.

The working marinas are the other one, and they are the reason the town exists. Zeke's Landing, Orange Beach Marina and SanRoc Cay sit around Terry Cove and the approaches to the pass, and between them they hold a charter fleet that is large by any standard — Zeke's alone is reported to run the biggest charter operation on the Gulf. Even if you never book a boat, it is worth walking a dock in the late afternoon when the offshore trips come in and the fish get hung up on the boards.

The two are ten minutes apart and complement each other. Book a boat at a marina in the morning, eat at The Wharf in the evening.

A note on the storms, because visitors ask. Hurricane Ivan came ashore on this coast in 2004 and Hurricane Sally in 2020, and both did serious damage to marinas, docks and waterfront buildings here. Rebuilding has been extensive and continuous, which is partly why so much of this town looks newer than its age. Individual structures have reopened at different rates, so check anything specific before you rely on it.