Gulf Islands National Seashore in Santa Rosa County, Florida

Photograph: Pensacola Beach - White Sands, Florida Coast (27268946483).jpg by Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 · 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.

Santa Rosa County attraction

Gulf Islands National Seashore

Santa Rosa County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

The largest national seashore in the country, 135,000 acres across Florida and Mississippi, with six drive-in areas on the Florida side.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Congress authorized the seashore on January 8, 1971, and it now takes in 135,457 acres, about 99,000 of them federally owned, spread across mainland tracts and parts of seven islands. It is the largest national seashore in the United States. The Florida district has six visitor areas, all reachable by car: Fort Pickens at the west end of Santa Rosa Island, the Santa Rosa area, Okaloosa near Fort Walton Beach, Perdido Key, the Naval Live Oaks Reservation at Gulf Breeze and the Pensacola forts on the mainland. The Mississippi islands, Petit Bois, Horn, East and West Ship and Cat, are reachable only by boat. The sand is nearly pure quartz washed down from the Appalachian Mountains over a very long time, which is why it is white rather than tan and stays cool underfoot. Between the developed beaches the seashore keeps long stretches of dune and scrub with nothing built on them

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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