FLORIDA PLACE TO EXPLORE
Venetian Pool
Miami-Dade County · South Florida & the Keys
A public swimming pool carved out of a four-acre limestone quarry in Coral Gables, opened in 1924.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The quarry supplied the stone for the houses of Coral Gables and was abandoned in 1921. George Merrick, who was building the city, had the hole turned into what he called the Venetian Casino, with Phineas Paist designing and the artist Denman Fink shaping the look of it: bridges, mooring posts, loggias, caves and a waterfall, borrowed from Venice and set in oolitic rock. It holds eight hundred and twenty thousand gallons of fresh water from artesian wells and is the largest freshwater pool in the United States. Depth runs from four to eight feet, a grotto cuts twelve feet into the hillside, and an island of palms with a sand beach sits in the middle. It went on the National Register in 1981 and is the only swimming pool on it. Until 1998 the water was drained every night; it is now filtered back into the aquifer through the ground. Residents pay considerably less than visitors
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