Myakka River State Park
Sarasota County. The Civilian Conservation Corps laid this park out in the 1930s and it opened in 1941, which makes it one of the oldest and by far the largest of Florida's state parks.
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Where can you see alligators and Florida wildlife?
Alligators are in fresh and brackish water in all 67 counties, so the question is where you can watch them safely from dry land.
Myakka River State Park in Sarasota County has a weir where they gather in numbers and a canopy walkway above the hammock. Paynes Prairie in Alachua County has a viewing platform over open savanna with wild horses and bison on it as well. The Shark Valley end of Everglades National Park in Miami-Dade puts a paved loop through the sawgrass. Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive, Fisheating Creek in Glades County and Wakulla Springs are all reliable. Big Cypress National Preserve in Collier County is the one place a Florida panther is a real possibility, though a sighting is rare. Never feed one, and keep dogs away from the water's edge.
The places named in this answer.
Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park
Alachua County. The prairie is a shallow basin that floods and drains, and the state made it Florida's first preserve rather than a park because the point is the land itself. It runs to nearly 23,000 acres south of Gainesville, holding twenty separate biological communities in one place, from wet prairie and marsh to hammock and pine.
Open the guide →Everglades National Park
Miami-Dade County. Congress authorized it in 1934 and it was established in 1947, and it was the first national park created to protect a fragile living system rather than a mountain or a canyon.
Open the guide →Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive
Lake County. The drive opens Friday, Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays, from seven in the morning until three, with everyone out by five. The speed limit is ten miles an hour, vehicles over twenty-five feet and trailers are not allowed, and the whole thing takes one to three hours depending on how often you stop.
Open the guide →Fisheating Creek Wildlife Management Area
Glades County. Fisheating Creek Wildlife Management Area covers 18,272 acres in Glades County, running from Palmdale down to Lakeport on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. The creek is the reason it is protected: it is the last free-flowing tributary left feeding Lake Okeechobee, coming off the southern end of the Lake Wales Ridge and threading through ancient cypress the whole way.
Open the guide →Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
Wakulla County. The spring opening lies 180 feet down, and the average flow is about 400,000 gallons a minute, with peaks measured at 860,000. That is a river coming out of a hole in the ground.
Open the guide →Big Cypress National Preserve
Collier County. Big Cypress and Big Thicket in Texas were designated the same year, creating a new category in the National Park System: land protected but still open to hunting, to off-road vehicles under permit, and to traditional use by the Miccosukee and the Seminole, who hold permanent rights to occupy and use it.
Open the guide →More questions like this.
Where are the glass-bottom boats in Florida?
Silver Springs in Marion County ran the first glass-bottom boats anywhere, from 1878, and they still run over the same spring vents, where the water is clear enough to read the bottom thirty feet down and the boats pass over sunken film sets left from the Tarzan and Sea Hunt years.
Where can you ride an airboat in Florida?
Airboats run on the shallow marsh where a propeller cannot, which in Florida means the Everglades and the headwater lakes and prairies north of them.
Where is the sightseeing in Florida?
The drive itself is half of it. The Overseas Highway runs 113 miles from the mainland to Key West across forty-two bridges, including the Seven Mile Bridge, with water on both sides most of the way.
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