Happenin’
Places › Florida › The Everglades › Coral Castle
Coral Castle

Photo: J. Miers (Wikivoyage user Jtesla16) / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

Coral Castle

Homestead, FL · The Everglades

About

One man, Edward Leedskalnin, spent 28 years quarrying and carving more than 1,100 tons of oolite limestone here by lamplight, alone, never letting anyone watch how he moved stones heavier than a car. The result is a stone garden of the strange and the tender: a nine-ton gate balanced so finely a child can swing it open with one hand, a Polaris telescope aimed at the North Star, a heart-shaped table, and a row of rocking chairs cut from solid rock. He built it for a fiancee who left him the night before their wedding, and the whole place still reads like a quiet argument that love is worth a lifetime of stone.

Highlights

Nine-ton revolving gate balanced to open with one handCarved single-handedly by Edward Leedskalnin over 28 yearsPolaris telescope, sundial, and heart-shaped stone tableMore than 1,100 tons of hand-quarried oolite limestone

Getting there

Related places

Everglades Airboat Tours Attractions

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.

Expedition: Bigfoot, The Sasquatch Museum Attractions

Expedition: Bigfoot, The Sasquatch Museum

Cherry Log, GA · North Georgia Mountains

Tucked along Highway 515 between Blue Ridge and Ellijay, this 4,000-square-foot shrine to Sasquatch claims the largest permanent collection of Bigfoot artifacts anywhere, and it does not pretend to be neutral about whether the big guy is real. Founded in 2016 by Navy veteran and Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization member David Bakara and his wife Malinda, it packs in wall after wall of footprint and handprint casts, sighting maps, hair samples, and listening stations piping out genuine recorded grunts and howls. You can settle into the Sasquatch Theater for looping eyewitness footage, gawk at the world's only Bigfoot research and tech ATV the Bakaras once drove on Florida investigations, and find a cast of a rare Bigfoot butt-print laid out on red velvet. Cap it with the gift shop, where David sells footprint casting kits he assembles himself.

Babyland General Hospital Attractions

Babyland General Hospital

Cleveland, GA · North Georgia Mountains

This columned white mansion is the official "birthplace" of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the soft-sculpture dolls Xavier Roberts dreamed up in these North Georgia hills. Time your visit for the hourly "delivery," when a Licensed Patch Nurse tends the Magic Crystal Tree, announces that a Mother Cabbage is in labor, doses her with "Imagicillin," and pulls a freshly born baby from the leaves while pink and blue BunnyBees decide the gender. You wander rooms full of dolls in incubators and adoption cribs, and yes, you can take one home with its own birth certificate. Admission is free, the staff play it gloriously straight, and the whole thing lands somewhere between sweet and wonderfully surreal.

Part of these collections

Curated guides that feature Coral Castle.

Florida Attractions44 places

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.