Florida

Overview

The Sunshine State, home of The Mouse, Jimmy Buffet, South Beach and NASCAR auto racing. This is a state that has built its entire identity around tourism. Why should you come here? Because it is the one place everyone else has visited as well.

That may not sound like much of a reason to travel to anywhere, but if you can’t swap stories about the lines at Disney World, the mosquitoes in the Everglades , the cold spring water at Ichetucknee, or the superiority of the white sand beaches of the Panhandle, well, I’m sorry my friend, but you’re just out of the loop.

With 16 million citizens and 170,000 square kilometers of land, Florida is as large and as varied as a medium-sized country, and as such can’t be seen in a weekend. It has been said that to truly understand a culture (and Florida has several), one must spend months immersed in it. With Florida this is a dangerous proposition. Many people who come to visit end up staying for the rest of their lives-which can make a person a little crazy.

Florida, of course, is known for many things: the Everglades; the sun, sand, and surf that make up Florida’s 1500 kilometers of beaches; the Florida Keys; South Beach, the trendiest place in the world at the moment; and, oh yes, Disney World. But there is much more.

Florida’s western Panhandle is home to some of the finest beaches in the United States. The only elevation to speak of in the...more

History

Florida is both old and new at the same time. Evidence suggests that Native Americans were living all around the state as much as 10,000 years ago; some archaeological remnants are worth exploring. The oldest continuously settled city in America, St. Augustine, sits on a bay thirty miles south of Jacksonville. At the same time, the oldest houses in Miami and Naples date from the first part of this century.

Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon made landfall on Florida's southwest coast in 1513, though the exact location is a matter of very vigorous debate (and de Leon himself was convinced that Florida was in fact a "vast island"). Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded the city of St. Augustine in 1565. There was a settlement at Pensacola prior to this, but the settlement disappeared and modern Pensacola was not founded until over 100 years after St. Augustine. Britain gained control of Florida in 1763, then promptly lost it twenty years later at the end of the American Revolution. The area remained under control of the Spanish until John Quincy Adams negotiated it away from them around 1820.

Spain had long had troubles in Florida and the area had never been heavily settled; the Seminole tribe resisted conversion to Catholicism and all attempts at domination by the Spanish; America would have the same problems. A series of extremely brutal and bloody wars resulted first in the Seminole nation's agreement to leave Florida for land out west, and finally in the virtual extermination of...more

When to Go

Essentials