Port Royal Plantation on Hilton Head Island

Port Royal Plantation is gated around the clock, and its roads are private. The association’s administration and security office is at 10 Coggins Point Road, where the pass office and the security gate share one number: (843) 681-5114 (extension 1101 for passes, 1200 for the gate). Owners and tenants drive in on a decal; everyone else needs a pass that a landowner has asked for.

There are two kinds of guest pass. A daily pass is for a guest visiting a landowner’s home for the day, with no overnight stay, and it covers only the drive from the gate to that home and back. A multi-day pass, for one to 30 days, lets a house guest stay over, drive anywhere inside and park in the association’s lots. Contractors buy a day, week or yearly pass of their own. What the gate doesn’t do is let a visitor in without a host: the reviews include a couple who were married on the Steam Gun beach and couldn’t get back in for a photo.

About a mile of beach runs around the point, facing the open ocean on one side and the calmer water of Port Royal Sound on the other, and with no hotels or public parking behind it, it is one of the quietest stretches on the island. The association owns 21 walkways to the sand, spread along the shore, each marked on the street side with its own number and the number of the nearest Town beach marker for emergencies. Most are for the homes around them; only three have parking, at the Beach House, the Steam Gun and Fort Walker Park, and only for cars with an owner’s or renter’s decal or a multi-day pass.

The sand below the high-tide line is public, as it is everywhere in South Carolina, but by land the only way to it is through the gate. Our Port Royal Beach page has more on the beach itself. For the same sound without a pass, Fish Haul Beach Park, a few minutes away, has a public lot, and our Hilton Head beaches guide lists the ocean beach parks.

The Beach House, at 45 South Port Royal Drive, is the community’s gathering place and the association’s biggest asset. The landowners voted for a multi-million-dollar rebuild, finished in January 2019, and each of them pays a Beach House assessment for it. It has a community room, a screened porch and a big oceanfront deck with rocking chairs, a boardwalk to the beach and beach lockers. Beside it are a large pool and a zero-entry children’s pool, open all year: group exercise from 6 to 10 in the morning, then open swim until sunset.

It is for landowners and their guests, not the public. A landowner can rent the event space, which holds about 150, for a private, non-commercial party up to four times a year, and weddings and rehearsal dinners here are a big part of its reviews.

Visitors come to Port Royal for its golf. Port Royal Golf Club, at 10 Clubhouse Drive, sits just outside the plantation gate, so you don’t need a pass to reach it. It has two 18-hole courses, Barony and Robber’s Row, that sell public tee times, plus a racquet club with tennis and pickleball. If you are looking for Port Royal Plantation restaurants, the one to know is in that clubhouse: Robber’s Row Grill is open to the public, with a patio over the course, and takes reservations by phone.

Inside the plantation, the association’s own courts are for landowners: six pickleball courts, booked online through ReserveMyCourt and busy with weekly groups, and two tennis courts off Fort Walker Drive, open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. For courts anyone can book, see our Hilton Head pickleball and Hilton Head tennis guides.

Port Royal holds more history than most of the island. At the start of the Civil War, Confederate troops held Fort Walker here on the point, and after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 about 13,000 Union soldiers landed and took the island. A wartime town grew up behind the beach, with stores, saloons, a theatre and a newspaper along a main street the soldiers called Robbers Row, the name one of the golf courses carries today.

Fort Sherman, an earthwork the Union Army built in 1862, is still largely intact, with entrances on Sherman Place and Sherman Drive; it was the headquarters of the Department of the South, and about 40,000 Union troops passed through Port Royal before the war ended. The Steam Gun, at the end of Fort Walker Drive, and Fort Walker Park have historical markers, as does the Beach House. They are all inside the gate, so they are for residents and their guests.

The modern community began in 1959, when the first covenants were recorded for part of the Grasslawn neighborhood and the first homes went up on Coquina Road. Its developer, Fred Hack’s Island Development Company, meant Port Royal to be homes only, with nearby Shipyard as the resort. The inn, a clubhouse and the first nine holes of Robbers Row opened in 1964, on the land where the Ocean Point neighborhood is now.

Short-term rentals are prohibited in Port Royal Plantation. The community’s declaration of covenants, restated by a two-thirds vote of the landowners and recorded with Beaufort County in December 2025, treats any rental of less than 180 continuous days as short-term and bans it. There are three narrow exceptions: a buyer renting from the seller while a sale goes through, the renewal of a lease that already ran 180 days, and one Port Royal landowner renting another’s home for at least 90 days. Before any lease starts, the owner and the tenant both sign the association’s lease approval form, and renters get decals only in the names on the lease.

So there are no weekly vacation rentals inside the gate. The nearest place to stay is Royal Dunes Resort, in the Port Royal resort area just outside the plantation gate, and most of the island’s vacation rentals are in Sea Pines, Palmetto Dunes, Shipyard, Shelter Cove and around Folly Field; our Hilton Head vacation rentals guide covers the companies that rent them.

Every home is a single-family house: the covenants allow one family home to a lot and no timeshares or fractional ownership, and a new house needs at least 1,700 square feet of enclosed space, more on some lots. The landowners pay the association’s annual assessment, for 2026 $2,282 for a lot with a house and $1,940 for an empty one, plus the Beach House assessment, and a sale pays a transfer fee of half of one percent. Exterior changes go to the Plans Approval Board, which meets on the first and third Tuesday of the month. Our Port Royal Plantation homes for sale page covers buying here.

Landowners keep busy: the association counts more than twenty social clubs. It has no map of the community on its website, only an island map. On one of those, look for Port Royal Plantation, HHI, at the island’s north-east corner, reached from US 278 by Coggins Point Road and a few minutes from the airport. Our Hilton Head neighborhoods guide compares it with the other communities.