Items19The creator’s order
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Apalachicola, FloridaA small Panhandle port where the river meets the bay, with a grid of historic squares and a riverfront once lined with brick warehouses. It feels nothing like resort Florida: shrimp boats, porches and a slow pace.
The oyster story is the reason to come now. The bay was closed to harvesting in…0 - 2
Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State ParkA huge spring south of Tallahassee with a 1937 lodge on its bank, where you can stay the night and take a ranger-led riverboat down the Wakulla River in under an hour. Expect alligators, wading birds and, in the cooler months, manatees.
Hollywood used it as a ready-made jungle: underwater scenes…0 - 3
Ichetucknee Springs State ParkThe classic Florida tubing river: a slow float down gin-clear, spring-fed water under a canopy of cypress and hardwoods, northwest of Gainesville. It is the best answer to a hot summer day that does not involve a water park.
Summer weekends get busy, and the park limits how many people launch. The…0 - 4
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State ParkThe Cross Creek farm where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote about backwoods Florida, including The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. The farmhouse, barn and a still-producing orange grove are kept much as they were in the 1930s and 1940s.
This is old rural Florida, before air…0 - 5
Cedar Key, FloridaA tiny island town on the Gulf at the end of a long causeway, known for clams, sunsets, kayaking among mangrove keys and a pace that makes the rest of Florida look frantic. There are no chain resorts and no theme to it.
It has taken a beating. Hurricane Helene in 2024 brought a surge of more than…0 - 6
Three Sisters Springs (Florida)The place to see manatees in winter. From November 15 to March 31, when the Gulf cools, manatees crowd into the warm springs at Crystal River, and the Three Sisters Springs boardwalk lets you watch them in clear water without getting wet.
During that season the springs are closed to swimmers and…0 - 7
Silver Springs State ParkA spring near Ocala that drew tourists long before Orlando's parks, and is now a state park. Glass-bottom boat rides here are usually traced to the 1870s, and they still float over the clear springs and the fish, turtles and eelgrass below.
The odd twist is the monkeys: a troop of wild rhesus…0 - 8
St. Augustine, FloridaFounded by the Spanish in 1565, 55 years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, St. Augustine is where Florida's European history starts. The Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, built of coquina, a stone made of compressed shells, and it never fell to…0 - 9
Blue Spring State ParkAbout an hour north of Orlando's rides, this spring on the St. Johns River is the closest way to swap a theme park day for a wild one. In winter manatees shelter in the spring run, and on a cold day in January 2024 the park counted 932 of them.
Boats are kept out of the spring while the manatees…0 - 10
Ybor CityTampa's old cigar district, built after Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his factory here from Key West in 1886. Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants rolled cigars in its brick factories and built social clubs that still stand, and the neighborhood is now a National Historic Landmark District.
Come…0