Discover Myrtle Beach

Myrtle Beach is the centre of the Grand Strand, an almost continuous run of about a hundred kilometres of sand along the South Carolina coast, and it is one of the busiest beach destinations in the United States — something like twenty million visitors a year to a city of about forty thousand people.

The beachfront is the whole proposition: a boardwalk running about a mile and a half, a seventy-metre observation wheel at the middle of it, amusement piers, and a strip of mini-golf courses dense enough that the town calls itself the capital of the sport. The Broadway at the Beach complex and Barefoot Landing hold the shopping and the theatres. Beach music and the shag — South Carolina’s official state dance, which came out of the pavilions along this coast in the 1940s — still have a circuit of clubs here.

Golf is the other economy: more than eighty courses within reach of the town, and a shoulder-season business built entirely around them. South at Murrells Inlet, Brookgreen Gardens occupies four former rice plantations and holds the largest collection of American figurative sculpture in the country, laid out among live oaks; Huntington Beach State Park is across the road and is one of the best birdwatching sites in the state. July and August are hot and crowded; spring and autumn are better. Hurricane season runs June to November.