The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Community leaders founded it in 1946 and it opened the following year as the South Florida Museum, moving from the old Memorial Pier to its present building in 1966 and taking the Bishop name in 2019. The collection runs from prehistory to the present, and its archaeological heart is the Montague Tallant collection, gathered from sites around this part of the coast. The Spanish Plaza, built in 1980, holds a replica of Hernando de Soto's house and a sixteenth century chapel. The planetarium opened in the mid-1960s, burned in a fire in 2001, was rebuilt in a four and a half million dollar project finished in 2005, and was upgraded again in 2020. The Parker Manatee Rehabilitation Habitat takes in manatees recovering from injury before their release, and for sixty-nine years it was the home of Snooty, born in 1948 and, when he died in 2017, the oldest manatee whose age was known for certain. Local buses stop outside