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Anastasia Salt Run — A Kayak Loop Five Minutes from St Augustine's Tourist Crush
St Augustine gets four million visitors a year. Almost none of them know that on the bay side of Anastasia State Park there's a sheltered tidal estuary, three miles of kayak loop through mangrove edges, where you'll see jumping mullet, the occasional dolphin, and zero tour buses.
Bahia Honda — The Best Beach in the Florida Keys (Yes, Better Than the Famous Ones)
Mile marker 37, between Marathon and Big Pine Key. A state park with two beaches that consistently get rated among the best in the U.S., a destroyed 1912 railroad bridge you can hike, and snorkel reef that's accessible from shore. Most Keys traffic drives past.
Big Cypress Loop Road — 24 Miles of Dirt Through Florida Panther Country
Everglades National Park has a paved scenic drive and a million visitors a year. Two miles east, Big Cypress National Preserve has Loop Road — 24 miles of dirt through cypress dome swamp, alligators in every roadside swale, and the most reliable Florida panther territory in the state. You'll see almost no one.
Bill Baggs Cape Florida — Miami's Best Snorkel Beach Is the One Locals Use
Fifteen minutes from downtown Miami, at the tip of Key Biscayne, there's a state park with a 200-year-old lighthouse, a mile of shaded beach, and a limestone rip-rap that's the most underrated shore-snorkel spot in South Florida. Tourists drive past it to get to South Beach. Don't be them.
Cayo Costa — Nine Miles of Empty Gulf Beach You Can Only Reach by Boat
There's no bridge. There's no parking lot. There's a ferry from Pine Island or Captiva that drops you on a barrier island with nine miles of Gulf-facing beach, primitive cabins, and the best shelling in the United States. Most people who live in Florida have never been here.
Devil's Den — Diving a Prehistoric Submerged Cave That Sits in a Pasture
It looks like a hole in a Williston cow pasture. You climb down into it on a wooden staircase. At the bottom is a 72°F freshwater dome that's been collecting fossils for ten thousand years. It is one of the strangest dive sites in the United States.
Egmont Key — A Spanish-American War Fort and a Tortoise Refuge in the Mouth of Tampa Bay
Stand at the mouth of Tampa Bay and look out — that island is Egmont Key. 1898 fortifications, a working 1858 lighthouse, and a federal wildlife refuge full of gopher tortoises. You get there only by boat. The ruins are the kind of place a movie scout would invent and an Army Corps engineer would call ridiculous.
The Everglades Back Country — A Day Trip Most Floridians Never Take
There's the Everglades you've heard about — the airboats, the gift shop, the boardwalk with the alligator at the end. And there's the Everglades you walk into, 90 minutes from where the buses turn around. The second one is the one worth your day.
Hontoon Island — The State Park You Reach via Free Passenger Ferry on the St Johns
Forty minutes from Orlando there's a state park you can't drive to. A free passenger ferry takes you across the St Johns River to 1,650 acres of bottomland hardwood, primitive cabins, and a 1955 archaeological dig that uncovered a six-foot Native American owl totem. Most Floridians don't know it exists.
Juniper Springs — Seven Miles of Jungle Paddle Through the Ocala National Forest
An hour from Orlando, the Juniper Springs Run is a 7-mile creek of 72-degree clear water through dense sub-tropical jungle — narrow enough that palm fronds brush your shoulders, slow enough that you drift, public enough that you can rent a kayak and a shuttle and be on the water in 20 minutes. Most paddlers…
Lignumvitae Key — The Last Untouched Hardwood Hammock in the Keys
A 280-acre island off Lower Matecumbe accessible only by boat, where ranger-led tours walk you through what the Upper Keys looked like before anyone showed up with a chainsaw. Mahogany, gumbo limbo, and lignum vitae trees that pre-date the state of Florida.
St. Joseph Peninsula — Seventeen Miles of Empty Panhandle Beach, with Scallops
On Florida's Forgotten Coast, between Apalachicola and Mexico Beach, a seventeen-mile sand peninsula juts into the Gulf. Dr. Beach has voted it the best US beach more than once. Two-thirds of it is wilderness — no road past the gate. And from July to September you can wade into St. Joseph Bay with a mesh bag…
Wakulla Springs — Glass-Bottom Boats over Mastodon Bones, an Hour from Tallahassee
One of the largest freshwater springs in the world, pumping 260 million gallons of 70°F water a day. The glass-bottom boats glide over fossilized mastodon bones 100 feet down. Tarzan movies were filmed here in the 1940s. Manatees winter in the spring run. And almost nobody outside the Panhandle has been.