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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.
Wakulla Springs south of Tallahassee runs glass-bottom trips when the water is clear, which depends on the rain, alongside a river cruise that runs whatever the weather. On saltwater, John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Key Largo takes a glass-bottom boat out to Molasses Reef for people who would rather not get in the water. Homosassa Springs has a fixed underwater observatory instead of a boat.
01Marion County. Glass bottom boats have run on this water since the 1870s, which makes them the oldest continuously operating attraction of their kind in the state, and they still leave from the head spring.
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02Wakulla 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.
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03Monroe County. It is named for John D. Pennekamp, a Miami newspaper editor who campaigned for the Everglades and then for this reef when it was being stripped for the curio trade.
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04Citrus County. People have been coming to this spring since the early 1900s, when a railroad along what is now Fishbowl Drive would put passengers off to walk down and look at it.
Open the guide →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.
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.
Venice in Sarasota County calls itself the shark tooth capital of the world, and its beaches back it up.
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