Fort De Soto Park in Pinellas County, Florida

Photograph: La Plage ^1, Fort De Soto Park, Tierra Verde, Floride. ^1 beach - panoramio.jpg by Richard Mc Neil · CC BY 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Pinellas County attraction

Fort De Soto Park

Pinellas County · Gulf Coast

Pinellas County's largest park, spread across five keys at the mouth of Tampa Bay around an 1898 coastal fort.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The park covers roughly a thousand acres across five connected keys, with Mullet Key holding the fort itself. The army built Fort De Soto in 1898 to guard the entrance to Tampa Bay during the Spanish-American War and gave it up in stages between 1910 and 1948. Four 12-inch mortars and two 6-inch Armstrong guns are still in place, and they are the only weapons of their type left anywhere in the United States. A reconstructed quartermaster storehouse opened as a museum in 2000. Two swimming beaches, North Beach and East Beach, face different water, and North Beach was placed first in the country on Dr. Beach's annual list in 2005. Seven miles of multi-purpose trail cross the keys, with bike lanes along the causeway. There are two fishing piers, a boat ramp, a canoe trail, a campground and a dog beach with its own shoreline. Over 328 bird species have been recorded here and loggerhead turtles nest on the beaches. The Pinellas Bayway reached it in 1962

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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