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The World's Tallest Sandcastle and Other Sandsculpture Marvels

by Willy Volk (RSS feed) on Jun 11th 2007 at 3:48PM

Earlier this month, a seven-person team of professional "sandcastlers" from Sarasota, Florida plugged away during Myrtle Beach's 2007 Sun Fun Festival. As a result of the pluck of "Team Sandtastic," Myrtle Beach can now boast that it created the World's Tallest Sandcastle. Measured by an independent surveyor, the sandcastle towered 49.55 feet in the air -- until Tropical Storm Barry did a little remodeling. If you're interested, you can check out a before-and-after video of the sandcastle and the storm's effect on it.

With a base of more than 90 feet and containing 4,800 cubic yards of sand (that's 300 truck-loads!), Team Sandtastic required 10 days to finish their masterpiece.

In addition to World's Tallest Sandcastle, Myrtle Beach also holds the World Record for World's Longest Sand Sculpture. At 86,535 feet long, that's more than 16 miles of sculpture!

Keep reading for some more images of Team Sandtastic's work, as well as details on some other unusual sandcastles around the world.

It's not like they just dumped the sand on a flat spot and called it a sandcastle. Sandtastic worked hard at giving the edifice plenty of texture, style, and beauty.

I think they did a great job creating something with pizzazz.

Here's the PREVIOUS record holder for World's Tallest Sand Castle. This castle stood 37 feet, 9 inches.

Here are some other remarkable sand sculptures from around the world. Sandcastlematt made this life-sized sandman out of driftwood and sand.

Pretty ingenious -- and not a little creepy.

Sandcastlematt has also figured out how to violate the principles of gravity and building floating sand castles.

I don't know if I've ever seen a sand sculpture car before. Here's a sand Ferrari:

I wouldn't have thought of a barrel as an interesting sand sculpture subject, but this one is lovingly created and beautifully executed.

I'm impressed that they managed to get lights in the windows of this sandcastle.

How do they make all these curves?

Not sure if bigoode created this sand sculpture, but he did photograph it.

Navid J captured this compelling -- and completely disturbing -- sand sculpture created during the 2006 US Open Sandcastle Competition.

Though this one is pretty creepy, too.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Justin Glow Jun 11th 2007 3:53PM

cool.

Crabby McSlacker Jun 11th 2007 8:38PM

So I came down here to make fun of the idea of "professional" sandcastlers...

Then I saw the pictures. Whoa.

These are fantastic! Thanks for showing us.

But damn it, now I wanna be a professional sandcastler!

(Crabby knows she's being obnoxious by coming here so often, but she can't seem to help it. Send her back to http://crankyfitness.blogspot.com/ where she belongs.)