Florida Attractions

For much of the world, Florida means the attractions. The theme parks that built Orlando, a working spaceport on the Atlantic coast, mermaids who have performed underwater since 1947, and a coral castle one man carved by hand. This is the big statewide guide to what people fly to Florida for, the giants and the roadside icons alike, from the Keys to the Panhandle.

44 places · Florida

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🎡 Attractions

EPCOT

Lake Buena Vista, FL · Central Florida

EPCOT is the Disney park built around a giant geodesic sphere, Spaceship Earth, that you can see rising over the trees long before you reach the gate. Past the front neighborhoods of pavilions devoted to technology and the natural world, the park opens onto World Showcase, a lagoon ringed by eleven country pavilions where you can eat your way from Mexico to Canada in an afternoon. It leans more toward food, fireworks over the water, and slow wandering than white-knuckle rides, which makes it the easiest of the Disney parks to simply stroll.

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Disney's Hollywood Studios

Lake Buena Vista, FL · Central Florida

Walt Disney built this Orlando park as a love letter to the movies, and the centerpiece still looks the part: a full-scale replica of Grauman's Chinese Theatre rising at the end of a palm-lined boulevard styled after 1930s Hollywood. The pink Hollywood Tower Hotel looms over Sunset Boulevard, the streets of Batuu bring Star Wars to walking-around life, and Toy Story Land shrinks you to the size of a green army man. It is the corner of Walt Disney World where the backlot fantasy of show business gets the run of an entire afternoon.

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Disney's Animal Kingdom

Lake Buena Vista, FL · Central Florida

Disney built a whole park around the idea that real animals could share a stage with imagined ones, and the 145-foot Tree of Life at its center carries hundreds of creatures carved into its trunk. Kilimanjaro Safaris rolls open-sided trucks across 110 acres where giraffes, lions, and elephants roam as they would on a savanna, while Pandora glows blue after dark with floating mountains lifted from the Avatar films. Come for the safari near opening when the animals are most active, and stay past sunset to watch the island light up.

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National Naval Aviation Museum

Pensacola, FL · Panhandle

Four Blue Angels Skyhawks hang in tight diamond formation above the seven-story glass atrium, and that is just the front door of one of the largest aviation museums on earth. More than 150 restored aircraft fill the floor, from a Curtiss flying boat that first crossed the Atlantic to Vietnam-era fighters and the jet that flew President George W. Bush, all of it on the home base of the Blue Angels at NAS Pensacola. Admission is free, parking is free, and on most Tuesday and Wednesday mornings from spring through fall you can catch the real Blue Angels practicing overhead.

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Universal Studios Florida

Orlando, FL · Central Florida

The spinning silver globe out front has greeted Orlando vacationers since 1990, and once you walk through the arch the whole park reads like a backlot you can step into. Cobblestone London opens onto the brick alleys of Diagon Alley, a New York block bends around a corner into San Francisco, and Springfield's storefronts sit a short stroll from old Hollywood. It is built for people who want to ride inside the movies, not just look at them, with screens, coasters, and sets stacked one street over from the next.

🎡 Attractions

Universal Islands of Adventure

Orlando, FL · Central Florida

Eight themed islands fan out from a working lighthouse at Port of Entry, and the walk between them swings from comic-strip Toon Lagoon to the dinosaur jungle of Jurassic Park. The pull here is the detail: the snow-dusted rooftops of Hogsmeade with Hogwarts Castle rising over the village, and the green arc of the Incredible Hulk Coaster launching riders out over the lagoon. Spend a morning in one corner and you will still find painted signs, hidden jokes, and queue rooms built to be wandered rather than rushed.

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Discovery Cove

Orlando, FL · Central Florida

Unlike the rest of Orlando, this park caps how many people come through the gate each day, so the white-sand beaches and warm lagoons never feel like a theme park. You wade into chest-deep water to meet a bottlenose dolphin face to face, drift the heated tropical river past a free-flight aviary where toucans and parrots land on your arm, and snorkel the Grand Reef among rays and reef fish. Reservations are the whole idea here, and so is the room to breathe.

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Legoland Florida Resort

Winter Haven, FL · Central Florida

Florida's first theme park grew up here as Cypress Gardens, and Lego bricks moved into the old grounds without paving over them. Kids steer their own boats, earn Lego driving licenses, and walk through Miniland USA, where the New York skyline and the Las Vegas Strip stand a few feet tall in plastic studs. Between the rides, the original botanical gardens still wind along the lakeshore, shaded by a banyan tree that has been spreading since 1939.

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Castillo de San Marcos National Monument

St. Augustine, FL · Northeast Florida

Spain started this star fort in 1672, and 350 years later it still guards Matanzas Bay at the edge of St. Augustine. The walls are coquina, a soft shell stone that swallowed cannonballs instead of shattering, which is part of why the fort was never taken by force. Walk the gun deck for the bay view, drop into the cool vaulted rooms below, and time it for a cannon firing when the rangers run one.

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Everglades Airboat Tours

Everglades City, FL · The Everglades

Out of Everglades City, an airboat trades the highway for a maze of mangrove tunnels and open sawgrass, the fan behind you pushing the flat hull across water only inches deep. Captains cut the engine where alligators sun on the banks and wading birds work the shallows, then open it up again down channels too tight and too shallow for any other boat. It is the closest you get to the Ten Thousand Islands backcountry without a paddle in your hands.

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Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum

Key West, FL · Florida Keys

Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote in this 1851 limestone house from 1931 to 1939, turning out To Have and Have Not and the Kilimanjaro stories in the studio out back. The descendants of his six-toed cats still nap on the porches and under the furniture, dozens of them, named for old movie stars in the writer's own tradition. Wander the shuttered French Colonial rooms, find the penny Pauline pressed into the deck of the saltwater pool, and the place feels less like a museum than a house someone just stepped out of.

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The Dali Museum

St. Petersburg, FL · Tampa Bay

A free-form geodesic bubble of 1,062 glass triangles, called the Enigma, erupts from an eighteen-inch concrete block built to ride out a hurricane, and it rises about seventy-five feet over the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront. Inside, a helical staircase spirals upward in a nod to Dali's fixation on the double helix, leading to the largest collection of his work outside Europe. The walls hold the late wall-sized masterworks, among them The Hallucinogenic Toreador and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, paintings you stand back from to take in whole.

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The Ringling

Sarasota, FL · Tampa Bay

John Ringling built his fortune on the circus and spent it on Italy, and you can read that whole story across one bayfront estate. Ca' d'Zan, the Venetian Gothic mansion he and Mable raised on Sarasota Bay, anchors grounds that also hold an art museum full of Old Master paintings (the Rubens canvases are enormous) and a circus museum where the Howard Bros. miniature recreates a full big-top show in tiny detail. Walk the rose garden, find the old banyan trees, and end at the water where the gilded tower throws its reflection.

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Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Miami, FL · Miami

James Deering built this Italian Renaissance villa on Biscayne Bay in the 1910s and filled its seventy-some rooms with European antiques, then set it behind ten acres of formal gardens where clipped hedges, fountains, and a grotto step down toward the water. Out in the bay sits the Stone Barge, a carved limestone breakwater that doubles as a sculpture and frames the view from the east terrace. Wander the maze garden and the casino on the mound, then follow the shaded native hammock trails that ring the estate.

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Edison and Ford Winter Estates

Fort Myers, FL · Southwest Florida

Thomas Edison built his winter home here on the Caloosahatchee River in the 1880s, and Henry Ford later bought the bungalow next door so the two friends could tinker side by side. The grounds hold the laboratory where Edison tested thousands of plants searching for a homegrown source of rubber, alongside a botanic garden Mina Edison filled with orchids and a moonlight garden meant to be walked at dusk. Out front spreads a banyan tree planted in 1925 from a sapling the size of a walking stick, now a grove of aerial roots covering most of an acre.

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Henry B. Plant Museum

Tampa, FL · Tampa Bay

Six silver minarets crowned with crescent moons rise over Tampa's riverfront, the unmistakable signature of the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel that railroad man Henry Plant built to lure Gilded Age travelers south. Inside the south wing, restored guest rooms and parlors hold the actual furnishings Plant shipped back from Europe and Asia, alongside the original electric lights and the elevator that still runs. Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders camped on these grounds before sailing for Cuba, and a walk under the horseshoe arches and along the long veranda makes it easy to picture why.

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Norton Museum of Art

West Palm Beach, FL · Palm Beaches

Florida's oldest art museum sits a few blocks off the Intracoastal, where a Foster + Partners redesign wrapped the original 1941 galleries in a low aluminum canopy and kept the old banyan tree growing right out front. Inside you'll find Cezanne and O'Keeffe alongside a deep run of Chinese jades and bronzes, a photography wing, and contemporary work by the likes of Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker. Spend the morning with the European paintings, then drift out to the sculpture garden and the glass-walled Great Hall before lunch in the restaurant off the lobby.

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Lightner Museum

St. Augustine, FL · Northeast Florida

Henry Flagler built the Alcazar in 1888 to pamper railroad-era winter guests, and the Gilded Age never quite left: behind the twin red-domed towers sit three floors of Tiffany glass, mechanical music machines, and Victorian curiosities Otto Lightner spent a lifetime collecting. The old indoor swimming pool, once the largest in the country, is now Cafe Alcazar, where you eat lunch on the tiled floor of the deep end. Wander the palm-shaded courtyard and you start to see why the building is half the exhibit.

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Perez Art Museum Miami

Miami, FL · Miami

Herzog and de Meuron wrapped this Biscayne Bay museum in a slatted canopy where Patrick Blanc's hanging garden columns spill down the pillars and broad terraces catch the breeze off the water. Inside, the collection leans into the art of the Americas and the wider Atlantic Rim, with deep holdings of contemporary Cuban and Caribbean work that you rarely see gathered in one place. Settle into one of the white hammocks on the veranda before you go, looking out over the bay and the downtown skyline.

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Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science

Miami, FL · Miami

Three glass towers, a planetarium, and a 500,000-gallon aquarium sit together on Biscayne Bay, and the whole place is built to be walked up through. Stand under the cone-shaped Gulf Stream tank and a 31-foot round window opens overhead, so hammerhead sharks and devil rays glide across the light while mahi-mahi school past. Upstairs the dome runs the night sky in 8K, the River of Grass exhibit traces the Everglades, and a rooftop terrace looks straight across the water to downtown.

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Flagler Museum

Palm Beach, FL · Palm Beaches

Henry Flagler built this 75-room white palace as a 1902 wedding gift for his wife Mary Lily, and the Beaux-Arts mansion still anchors the island the railroad baron's money put on the map. Behind the colonnade you walk through a marble-columned Grand Hall, gilded salons, and a music room with a working pipe organ, then out to the pavilion where his private railcar No. 91 sits gleaming. It is the clearest window in Florida into the Gilded Age that built Palm Beach, kept much as the Flaglers left it.

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Chihuly Collection

St. Petersburg, FL · Tampa Bay

Dale Chihuly's glass turns architecture into a path you walk through, twelve rooms shaped by architect Albert Alfonso so each series gets its own light. The Ruby Red Icicle Chandelier was built for this building, and the finale, Mille Fiori, fills a room with a thousand glass flowers, sea creatures, and reeds rising from the floor. Your ticket also covers a live glassblowing demonstration across the street at the Morean Glass Studio and Hotshop, where the heat and breath behind the work are on full display.

🎡 Attractions

Wynwood Walls

Miami, FL · Miami

Tony Goldman turned a cluster of windowless warehouse facades into an open-air canvas in 2009, and the courtyard has been repainted by artists from dozens of countries ever since. Shepard Fairey's portraits, Kenny Scharf's cartoon faces, and walls that change between visits make the steel WYNWOOD WALLS gate worth lining up for. Bring a camera and plan to wander the surrounding blocks, where the murals spill far past the official lot.

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Clearwater Marine Aquarium

Clearwater, FL · Tampa Bay

A working marine hospital on the Clearwater Beach waterfront, where rescued dolphins, sea turtles, manatees, and river otters recover in pools you can watch up close. It opened in 1972 inside a former water treatment plant, and its tailless dolphin Winter, who swam with a prosthetic tail, drew the world here through the Dolphin Tale films. The work is the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured sea life, so what you see is a real animal hospital rather than a show.

🎡 Attractions

ZooTampa at Lowry Park

Tampa, FL · Tampa Bay

A 63-acre zoo in north Tampa that runs the only nonprofit hospital in the world built just for sick, injured, and orphaned wild manatees, with viewing pools where you can watch the rescues recover before they head back to Florida waters. Asian elephants, Malayan tigers, and Bornean orangutans anchor the geographic exhibits, while a walk-through free-flight aviary puts you eye to eye with hornbills and toucans. Florida's own panthers, red wolves, and roseate spoonbills round out a collection that leans hard into wildlife the state is actually fighting to save.

🎡 Attractions

Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens

Jacksonville, FL · Northeast Florida

On the banks of the Trout River north of downtown Jacksonville, 122 acres run together as zoo and botanical garden, so a stroller and a serious plant person both leave happy. Walk the Plains of East Africa for white rhino and giraffe you can hand-feed, then watch jaguars swim glass-side in Range of the Jaguar and Malayan tigers prowl the catwalks of Land of the Tiger. Save time for the gardens themselves, where Savanna Blooms and the bamboo plantings of the Asian section make the walk between exhibits the quiet payoff.

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The Florida Aquarium

Tampa, FL · Tampa Bay

Downtown Tampa's aquarium walks you from Florida's freshwater springs out to the open ocean, with alligators and river otters along the Wetlands Trail and a 500,000-gallon Coral Reef tank where sand tiger sharks and stingrays glide past the glass. The African penguin colony and the touch-friendly Stingray Beach tend to pull the biggest crowds at feeding time. From the Channelside dock you can board a Wild Dolphin Cruise to look for the bottlenose dolphins that live out in Tampa Bay.

🎡 Attractions

Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium

Sarasota, FL · Tampa Bay

Mote traces its roots to Dr. Eugenie Clark, the marine biologist known as the Shark Lady, and that legacy runs through the Science Education Aquarium at University Town Center. Stand beneath the 400,000-gallon Gulf Coast habitat and watch sharks, rays, and sea turtles glide overhead, then meet manatees, a giant Pacific octopus, and Humboldt penguins across galleries that double as a working research lab. Touch tanks, daily feedings, and behind-the-glass conservation stories make it as much a field station as an aquarium.

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Brevard Zoo

Melbourne, FL · Space Coast

Brevard Zoo lets you paddle a kayak past white rhinos and giraffe in its Expedition Africa wetland, the only place in the country where you can. Hand a leaf up to a giraffe from the feeding deck, walk through a free-flight aviary thick with lorikeets and cockatiels, or clip into the TreeTop Trek ropes course and cross above the alligators. Built and largely funded by the community since 1994, it spreads more than 900 animals across 75 acres of Space Coast scrub and lagoon.

🎡 Attractions

Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens

Naples, FL · Southwest Florida

A botanist named Henry Nehrling started planting this place in 1919, and the zoo still threads its paths through his century-old tropical trees and the lakes a later owner carved out of the grounds. Board the catamaran on Lake Victoria and you drift past islands where lemurs, gibbons, and apes lounge in the open, then walk on to find Florida panthers, lions, and giraffes you can hand a leaf to. It is a small zoo grown into an old garden, shaded and unhurried in a way the bigger parks rarely manage.

🎡 Attractions

St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park

St. Augustine, FL · Northeast Florida

Open since 1893, this is one of Florida's oldest attractions, and in 1993 it became the first place anywhere to display every living species of crocodilian, all 24 of them, from dwarf caimans to gharials. Maximo, a saltwater crocodile north of 15 feet and well past 1,000 pounds, holds court in his own pool while a boardwalk carries you over alligators basking below. Come spring, the canopy above those gator pools fills with a wild rookery of nesting egrets, herons, wood storks, and roseate spoonbills, which raise their chicks where no raccoon dares climb down.

🌺 Gardens & wildlife

Bok Tower Gardens

Lake Wales, FL · Central Florida

Bok Tower Gardens crowns Iron Mountain, one of the highest points on the Florida peninsula, with a 205-foot art deco and neo-Gothic Singing Tower rising above 50 acres of woodland gardens in Lake Wales. The tower's 60-bell carillon plays daily concerts, its sound carrying over a reflecting pool that mirrors the whole spire. Visit in late winter for peak camellia and azalea bloom.

🌺 Gardens & wildlife

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

Coral Gables, FL · Miami

Eighty-three acres of palms, cycads, and flowering trees spread across the edge of Biscayne Bay, with royal palms lining the long reflecting channel of the Bailey Palm Glade and a two-acre rainforest where waterfalls run beneath the canopy. The Wings of the Tropics conservatory keeps hundreds of butterflies in the air year round, while the edible garden grows fruit you will not find at the grocery store, from durian to dozens of mango varieties. Founded in 1938 around the collections of plant explorer David Fairchild, it remains a working research garden as much as a place to wander a quiet morning.

🌺 Gardens & wildlife

Sunken Gardens

St. Petersburg, FL · Tampa Bay

A plumber named George Turner drained a shallow lake here in 1903 and planted what grew into four acres of dense subtropical jungle, sunk well below street level so the city seems to disappear once you step down into it. Brick paths wind past cascading waterfalls, koi ponds, and a flock of Chilean flamingos descended from birds that have lived here since the 1950s, under a canopy of royal palms and century-old plantings. It is one of Florida's oldest roadside attractions, a survivor from the era of hand-painted highway signs that the city of St. Petersburg now keeps as a living museum.

🌺 Gardens & wildlife

Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens

Delray Beach, FL · Palm Beaches

George Morikami farmed pineapples here as the last of the Yamato Colony, and willed the land to the county so Florida would remember the Japanese families who settled it. Today his gift is Roji-en, six gardens drawn from a thousand years of Japanese design, where a path winds past koi ponds and bonsai to a museum holding thousands of artifacts. Pause at the tea house, watch the carp surface beneath the pines, and the South Florida heat falls away.