The Marconi Station Site is located on a bluff 100 feet above the beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. To drive to the site from the Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham, turn left (west) onto Nauset Road for 0.2 miles. Turn right onto US 6 and continue for 4.9 miles to a traffic light with a right turn lane in Wellfleet. Turn right onto Marconi Beach Road and drive 0.1 miles before turning left onto Marconi Station Road. Continue on Marconi Station Road for one mile to the end of the road, passing the headquarters of the seashore at 0.2 miles. At the end of the road, there are 39 standard parking spots and three handicap-accessible spots. A small accessible restroom facility located near the parking lot is open seasonally. An accessible paved ramp leads from the parking lot to the observation deck. Beyond the deck are stairs and a paved walkway to the historical marker and back to the parking lot. Parts of this second walkway may be too steep for a wheelchair user without an assistant.
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio communication, had a radio-telegraph station built at South Wellfleet to send telegraph messages across the Atlantic Ocean without using one of the undersea cables already in use. A test message was sent on December 17, 1902, with the first public message sent on January 18, 1903, from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII. The station was closed by the Navy in 1917 for security reasons and it was scrapped in 1920 as newer technologies had made Marconi's spark-gap transmitter obsolete.
There is no beach access from the Marconi Station Site as the site is located atop a 100-foot bluff above the beach. Even though there are fences and warning signs, visitors have created social paths to the edge of the bluff. We visited the site in October 2021.
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| Ramp up to the observation deck |
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| Atlantic Ocean from the ramp |
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| View of the parking lot from the observation deck |
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| View of the ocean from the observation deck looking northeast |
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| View to the east |
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| View to the southeast |
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| The Great Beach |
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| View of the ocean from the historical marker |
Cape Cod National Seashore beach entrance fees are collected daily from late June through Labor Day, and on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day to the middle of September at select beaches. The six national seashore beaches where fees are collected are Coast Guard and Nauset Light in Eastham, Marconi in Wellfleet, Head of the Meadow in Truro, and Race Point and Herring Cove in Provincetown.
When an entry fee is collected, a fee of $25 per vehicle, $20 per motorcycle, or $15 per person is valid for the same day at Cape Cod National Seashore. Other fee payment options include the America the Beautiful - National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands passes including the Annual Pass ($80), Senior Pass ($80 for a lifetime), Access Pass (free with a documented disability), and Military Annual Pass (free for active-duty personnel). Also available is a Cape Cod National Seashore Annual Pass for $60.
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