Florida State Parks Worth the First Visit
Florida has 175 state parks. These ten are the ones a first-time visitor should actually drive to — for the springs, the shorelines, the live oak hammocks.
A team of writers and curators covering Florida's hidden gems — the independent restaurants, dive bars, coffee shops, and odd little places worth a detour across the Sunshine State. Every spot in our guides is hand-picked, never sponsored.
Florida has 175 state parks. These ten are the ones a first-time visitor should actually drive to — for the springs, the shorelines, the live oak hammocks.
Florida's coastline runs roughly 1,350 miles, which is more than California's, and yet the popular imagination compresses it to about six places: Miami Beach, Key West, Destin, Clearwater, Daytona, and whatever stretch of the Panhandle is currently on a billboard in Atlanta. The
Floridians don't measure the year in seasons. We measure it in humidity percentages, hurricane cones, and how long the line is at Versailles in Little Havana. The calendar that matters here has almost nothing to do with the one printed on your fridge — January and July are functi
Most visitors plan a Florida trip around the coast and never look inland. That is a mistake. The state sits on the largest concentration of artesian springs on earth — more than a thousand of them, most clustered in a band running from the Panhandle down through Ocala National Fo