Every few months, another surf park gets announced somewhere around the Valley. Renderings drop, a groundbreaking date gets set, and then a lot of the time, nothing happens on schedule, or nothing happens at all. Gilbert's project just became the latest to fall apart, so I went and checked on every other surf park currently in some stage of "coming soon" around Phoenix to see which ones are actually real.
Gilbert: dead, for the third time. Cactus Surf Park started in 2019 as a $60 million public-private deal between the city and Strand Resorts at Gilbert Regional Park. That fell through, and in 2021 the project sold to a company called ACA Arizona LLC, which renamed it Cactus Surf Park. In 2023 it got redesigned again to cut water use by 60%, with WhiteWater West Industries brought in as the partner to actually build it. In May 2026, Gilbert and WhiteWater West mutually terminated the lease. Three different companies, seven years, still no pool. Gilbert says it's now looking at other uses for the 25-acre site and wants community input before deciding what's next.
Mesa: the one that actually got built. Revel Surf opened December 16, 2024, as the anchor of Cannon Beach, a $280 million, 37-acre development. The surf lagoon itself is a $45 million, 4.5-acre piece of it, with a two-acre wave basin holding three million gallons of water, four wave types, cliff-diving platforms, restaurants, and a skate park. They broke ground in 2021, the same year Gilbert's deal first changed hands, and still got it open despite a two-year supply chain delay. It's the proof this can work here, it's just rare.
Maricopa: biggest plans, shakiest timeline. PHX Surf is the most ambitious project on the board, a 40-acre resort about 40 minutes south of Phoenix with a 137,000-square-foot surf lagoon, a hotel district with 100 3D-printed bungalows, RV camping, restaurants, and a second phase that adds a water park and event venue. The catch: this is the second groundbreaking date they've set. A December 2024 start came and went with nothing public to show for it, and the current target, March 2026, has also now passed with no confirmed construction as of this writing. The design work is real and finished. Whether shovels are actually in the ground is not confirmed yet.
Buckeye: too early to call. The newest name on the list. In January 2026, a California developer paid $10.5 million for the old Hidden Lake wedding and events venue, a 120-acre property with a 60-acre lake, and filed plans with Maricopa County to turn it into Hidden Lake Surf Resort, with "one or more surf lagoons" alongside event space, retail, and food and beverage. This is still at the paperwork stage. No construction timeline has been announced.
So out of four surf park projects tied to the Valley right now, one is open, one is dead, one has a design but a track record of missed groundbreaking dates, and one is barely past the land purchase. That's roughly the going rate for these projects nationally, big, exciting renderings are cheap, actually pouring concrete on a multi-acre wave pool in the desert is not.
This is part of a running series here. Every week I pick a Valley development story and go check what's actually true versus what's just been announced. You can catch every project covered so far, from TSMC's expansion to the old Metrocenter site, at New Development Updates: Every Phoenix Project We've Covered.
Which one do you think actually gets built next, or do you think Gilbert should try again with its 25 acres instead?
Sources: Wave Pool Magazine, AZBEX, Gilbert Sun News, East Valley Tribune, Gilbert's newsroom, Phoenix New Times, Surfer Magazine, KTAR/Phoenix Business Journal, Construction Reporter, AO Architects.
