McWay Falls, Coastal waterfall in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, California.

McWay Falls is an 80-foot (24 m) waterfall on McWay Creek in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, about 37 miles south of Carmel. It drops as a thin white column down a rough gray, tan and brown rock face, with green vegetation on the upper sections, and lands on a flat tan sandy beach between large rock formations. At high tide it becomes a tidefall emptying into the Pacific.

In 1924 the Brown family purchased the land from Christopher McWay and established Saddle Rock Ranch on the property. The family later donated the ranch to the state of California so it could become a public park.

The park is named for Julia Pfeiffer Burns, a Big Sur pioneer and friend of Hélène Hooper Brown, who donated Saddle Rock Ranch to the state in 1961 on condition it be named for her. Visitors can see remnants of the Browns' Waterfall House foundation, palm trees from its landscaping, and the funicular railway; Hans Ewoldsen's original Pelton wheel is displayed in a small building.

From the parking area just east of Highway 1, a dirt path leads through a short tunnel under the road to the Waterfall Overlook, built on the site of the Browns' former mansion. The walk is about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) and wheelchair accessible. The beach below cannot be reached on foot; it is accessible only by boat and may be covered by surf at high tide.

The sandy beach beneath the falls did not exist before 1983. That year a huge mudslide north of the park dumped nearly 3,000,000 cubic yards of material onto the coast, and wave action carried sand south to McWay Cove. The falls now reach the ocean only at high tide.