Pirates Cove sits on the west side of Point Dume in Malibu, a small crescent of sand below the headland that you get to by rounding the point from Westward Beach at low tide. No archive records who named it, and nothing has ever come out of the sand there. What did happen along this coast is better documented than the legend, and quite a bit stranger.
The stories attached to this stretch run from a real privateer who burned a California ranch and sacked a mission town, to a 1908 oil prospector who swore he found a pirate chest in a canyon at the west end of Malibu. Some of it holds up. Some of it is newspaper invention from an era when papers ran treasure stories on slow weeks. Both are worth knowing if you spend time on this coast or own a piece of it.
Where Pirates Cove in Malibu Is, and How You Reach It
The cove is a pocket beach on the western flank of the Point Dume headland, below the trail that runs out to the whale watching overlook. There is no road down to it and no marked path. Beachgoers get there from the south end of Westward Beach, around the base of the point, which only works on a low or falling tide. The Point Dume Natural Preserve sits on the bluff above.
Film crews found the spot early. The closing beach sequence of the 1968 Planet of the Apes was shot on this stretch of Point Dume, and location researchers place the Forbidden Zone dig site at the cove itself, reached by a footbridge the crew built to get people and gear down.
As of mid August 2026, the usual way in is closed. Los Angeles County has shut Westward Beach Road beyond the pay gate and the Point Dume Beach parking lot until further notice, after high tides and surf sped up erosion along the bluff and left drop offs of up to eight feet in places. Crews started emergency repairs on August 6, with the Westward Beach Road entrance at Birdview Avenue closed to everyone, walkers and cyclists included, from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. on work days. Restrooms 1, 2 and 3 are out while the water line is fixed, with temporary facilities nearby. The county page carries the current status, so it is worth a look before driving out.
The Only Documented Pirate Raid on the California Coast
California never had a Caribbean style pirate era. It had one armed raid, and the record on that one is detailed.
Hippolyte de Bouchard was French born and sailed under a commission from the new government of Argentina, which made him a privateer rather than a pirate in the legal language of the day. His two ships, La Argentina and Santa Rosa, appeared off Monterey on November 20, 1818. His men went ashore on November 24, fought for about an hour, and took the fort.
Then he worked south. Sentries spotted his sails from Tranquillon Mountain on December 1, and by the next afternoon the ships were off Refugio, up the coast from Santa Barbara. The Ortega family had already emptied their ranch and moved inland. Bouchard's men stampeded cattle through the vineyards, killed livestock, and burned every building. Three of his crew were caught there, an American, a Paraguayan and a Jamaican, and jailed at Santa Barbara.
At Santa Barbara on December 5 he found the mission ready for him. The padres had armed and drilled roughly 150 of the Native converts living there. Bouchard traded his three captured men for a prisoner of his own and sailed out without attacking. On December 14 his ships appeared off Mission San Juan Capistrano, and on December 16 about 140 men and three cannon came ashore, took supplies and ammunition, and burned buildings including the governor's house and the king's stores, the royal supply warehouse. He left California soon after and never returned.
To get from Refugio to Capistrano, Bouchard sailed the entire length of the Malibu coast. No record has him ashore here. The water off Point Dume is deep enough to pass well outside the surf line, and that is almost certainly what he did.
Pirates Cove, Sequit Canyon, and Malibu's Buried Treasure Legends
The treasure stories are a newspaper phenomenon, and they cluster tightly around 1907 and 1908.
The Cincinnati Enquirer ran an account on December 27, 1907 of caves in a cove north of Point Dume, complete with peculiar markings on the walls and stones said to mark buried caches, with Arch Rock and Pinnacle Rocks as the landmarks that got you there. A Los Angeles Times piece the following October described Malibu as "a narrow stretch of tempting caves and coves, once the rendezvous of pirates, smugglers, outlaws and bandits."
The best of them involves a man named William Drake. In 1908 he was prospecting for oil in Sequit Canyon, at the western end of Malibu near what is now Leo Carrillo State Beach, when he and his partners turned up a piece of canvas about six feet down. It carried a skull and crossbones and the words "Death to all traitors." They kept digging and uncovered what the Times account called "what had every appearance of an immense iron chest," before groundwater flooded the hole, buried the tools, and left the diggers "scant time in which to escape with their lives."
Drake headed to Santa Monica for a pump to drain the hole and told the story along the way. He believed the chest held gold buried by the crew of Thomas Cavendish, the English privateer who captured the Manila galleon Santa Ana in the Gulf of California on November 4, 1587. One of Cavendish's ships, the Content, vanished after that capture, and the legend places its share of the cargo somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains. Drake was never heard from again, and no chest has ever surfaced.
The same stretch of years produced the story that the bandit Tiburcio Vásquez buried gold in Las Flores Canyon, which we covered in Malibu Banditos and the Lost Gold of the Santa Monica Mountains. The Malibu Post gathered most of these clippings in one place, and they are a good read as journalism history whether or not you believe a word of them.
The Smuggling That Really Happened Off Point Dume and the Los Angeles Coast
The genuine criminal history of these coves starts in January 1920, when the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol.
The method stayed consistent up and down the coast. Steam powered mother ships anchored beyond the three mile limit, waited for dark, and moved hundreds of cases onto fast contact boats, which ran for a chosen landing spot where trucks under tarpaulins were waiting. Most of the liquor came from syndicates in Vancouver, with more brought up from Mexico.
Point Dume was one of the named landing spots, along with the Malibu Pier, the Playa del Rey Pier, Wilmington and Long Beach, per the Palos Verdes Library District's history of the trade. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1922 that about half the illegal cargo on the Southland coast came ashore at the Los Angeles Harbor wharves, with the rest spread along the shoreline from Point Vicente to Point Fermin. The isolated coves of Portuguese Bend, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, were the favorite.
This was a real industry rather than a sideline. By 1926 the Times estimated the annual traffic at 150,000 cases of Scotch worth more than $10 million coming into Southern California, and a smuggler told the paper that roughly one boat in a hundred was caught. On September 10, 1924, investigators from the county District Attorney's office exchanged gunfire for several minutes with rum runners who were loading liquor from a speedboat into cars on the beach at Portuguese Bend. The smugglers drove off toward Point Fermin.
The traffic ran north of Malibu as well. Near Hueneme in 1925 authorities seized 65 barrels of liquor valued at almost $68,000, and that May the Times valued one rum fleet's cargo at $3 million, according to the Museum of Ventura County.
Malibu was quiet ground for this work for a simple reason. The Rindge family bought the Malibu ranch in 1892 and spent the next three decades keeping a railroad, a highway and the public off it. A coastline with no public road and almost no residents makes an excellent place to unload something. The highway that finally opened this coast to everyone is the same one that turned Malibu into a real estate market.
What Malibu's Hidden Coves Mean for Property Today
The geography that made this coast useful to smugglers is the geography that prices it now. A cove invisible from PCH, a beach you can only visit on certain tides, a bluff that puts distance between a house and everyone else. Those were operational advantages in 1925 and they are the premium features on a listing in 2026.
They also produce the questions that take longest to answer in a Malibu escrow. Where the public's right to walk ends and private ownership begins is set by the mean high tide line, and that line moves, which we broke down in our guide to private versus public sand. Whether a stairway down a bluff is a deeded right or a neighbor's courtesy is a title question. On Point Dume, beach access is held as deeded tract rights that follow parcel lines rather than proximity to the water, which our Point Dume buyer's guide covers street by street.
None of that is new. It is the current version of the argument this coast has been having since the Rindges put up their gates, over who gets to reach the water and from where.
Looking at Homes For Sale Point Dume?
Point Dume rewards buyers who know the details, from which parcels carry deeded beach rights to how the bluff behaves in a heavy winter. Our team has worked Malibu real estate for more than two decades and knows this peninsula lot by lot. Reach out anytime to browse current listings or to talk through what you are after.