Cousins Beach Doesn't Exist. Wilmington Is Getting the Tourists Anyway.
"Cousins Beach is fictional. The tourism economy around it isn't."
That sentence sounds slightly ridiculous until you realize that people are now planning entire vacations around a town that does not technically exist.
The Summer I Turned Pretty takes place in Cousins Beach, a dreamy East Coast town filled with beach houses, bookstores and endless summer sunsets. But if you actually type "Cousins Beach" into a map, you won't find Belly's house or the boardwalk where Conrad and Jeremiah spent their summers.
What you'll find instead is a collection of real places across coastal North Carolina that came together to create one fictional location.
Wilmington became the center of production, but Cousins was built from pieces borrowed from Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach and Southport. The arcade scenes came from Carolina Beach. Snowy beach moments were filmed at Fort Fisher in Kure Beach. The famous "Entering Cousins Beach" sign stood in Southport.
Downtown Wilmington supplied restaurants, bookstores and streets that millions of viewers now recognize instantly.
And fans noticed.
Travel experts call this phenomenon "set-jetting," which basically means people choosing their next trip because they fell in love with a place on screen.
Wilmington has become one of the biggest examples of it in recent years. The city has spent decades doubling as fictional locations for television shows, but The Summer I Turned Pretty introduced its beaches and small businesses to an entirely new generation of viewers.
The strange thing is that fans are not actually looking for a fictional town.
They're looking for feelings.
Nobody travels to Papercut Books because they urgently need a novel. People visit because, for a few minutes, they want to stand inside Whale of a Tale. They order coffee at cafés because Belly might have walked past the same window. They sit on a beach because they want to feel like they accidentally wandered into one of Susannah's summers.
The places themselves haven't changed. The emotional meaning attached to them has.
Local businesses have felt the impact. Restaurants, hotels and shops featured in the show have reported increased interest from visitors hoping to recreate parts of Cousins in real life.
Tourism organizations have leaned into that excitement so much that there is now an official itinerary guiding fans through filming locations, from bookstores and bakeries to beaches and hotels.
The itinerary is honestly fascinating because it treats ordinary places like landmarks from a shared memory.
A pizza restaurant becomes the place where Belly and Steven talked. A boardwalk becomes the site of Conrad winning Junior Mint. A small bookstore becomes proof that fictional stories can permanently change the way people see real streets.
But there is another side to all of this.
As filming continued, production crews had to ask fans to stay away from active sets because crowds were disrupting shoots and creating safety problems.
That tension exists in almost every fandom tourism boom. People want to get as close as possible to the story they love, but film sets are workplaces, not attractions. And some of the locations that appear on screen are still private homes where actual families live.
There is a difference between visiting a public beach and treating someone's front porch like part of a theme park.
Maybe that's the real lesson of Cousins Beach.
The show proves that stories can completely transform the places around us. A bookstore becomes magical. A boardwalk becomes romantic. A stretch of sand becomes unforgettable.
But the best version of fandom tourism isn't pretending that fiction is real. It's appreciating the fact that real places, cafés and neighborhoods were ordinary long before Belly Conklin ever arrived, and they'll still be there after summer ends.