Wakulla Springs State Park

Wakulla is a first-magnitude spring, meaning it discharges an enormous volume of water, pouring out a river's worth every day from a deep cavern in the limestone below. The water is the visible outlet of the Floridan aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that supplies much of the state, filtered clean through the rock and emerging cold and, in good conditions, gin clear.

Below the surface lies one of the most extensive underwater cave systems ever explored, a maze of flooded passages that cave divers have mapped for miles into the earth. That hidden plumbing connects the spring to sinkholes and rivers across the region, and it makes Wakulla a place where the ordinarily invisible workings of Florida's water are laid bare, a rare direct view into the aquifer that sustains the whole peninsula.

The clear depths of Wakulla have preserved an extraordinary record of the distant past. Divers and researchers have recovered the bones of mastodons, giant ground sloths, and other Ice Age megafauna from the spring and its caverns, animals that lived here when sea levels were lower and the land was drier. The spring has become an important site for understanding what Florida looked like tens of thousands of years ago.

People have lived around Wakulla for a very long time as well, and the area holds evidence of some of the earliest human presence in the Southeast. The Native peoples of this region, and later the Apalachee, whose ancestral homeland lay across the Florida Big Bend, knew and used these waters long before Europeans arrived. The spring's name itself comes from a word in the Native languages of the region.

In the mid-1930s the financier Edward Ball, associated with the du Pont business interests in Florida, acquired the spring and built the Wakulla Springs Lodge overlooking it. Completed in 1937, the lodge is a handsome Mediterranean-revival building of stone and cypress, with a grand lobby, painted ceiling beams, marble, and an old-fashioned soda fountain, and it has changed remarkably little in the decades since.

Staying or dining at the lodge feels like stepping into an earlier era of Florida travel, before the interstate and the theme parks. Ball protected the springs from development, and after his death the estate passed to the state, which established the park in the 1980s. The lodge remains the centerpiece, a rare unspoiled resort of old Florida sitting above one of its natural wonders.

The Wakulla River that flows from the spring is a corridor of wildlife, and the park's guided river boat tours are the classic way to see it. Alligators bask on the banks and log jams, turtles line up on fallen trunks, and the trees are full of herons, egrets, anhingas, ospreys, and limpkins. In winter, manatees move up into the warm spring run to escape the cold Gulf water.

When the spring runs clear, glass-bottom boats let visitors peer straight down into the depths of the spring itself, watching fish and the play of light in water many tens of feet deep. Between the boat tours, the swimming area, the wooded trails, and the birdlife, Wakulla offers a full immersion in the wild, watery Florida that existed long before the coasts were developed.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.