🕳️ Caves

Florida Caverns State Park

Marianna, FL · Panhandle

About

This is the one place in Florida where a ranger walks you underground, down lit limestone passages hung with stalactites, columns, and rippled flowstone that took a few hundred thousand years of dripping rainwater to build. The dry, air-filled caverns were carved out by hand by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, and aboveground the Chipola River, the cool Blue Hole swimming spring, and shady floodplain trails round out the day. Book the guided cave tour ahead in summer, because the small group sizes fill fast and it is the only way in.

Highlights

Guided tour of Florida's only public air-filled limestone cavernsStalactites, stalagmites, columns, and flowstone formationsBlue Hole swimming springChipola River paddling and floodplain hiking trails1930s Civilian Conservation Corps history

Getting there

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Florida State Parks

Florida's park service runs about 175 state parks, and these are the ones worth planning a trip around. Wild barrier islands and sugar-sand beaches, deep springs and dark caverns, 19th-century forts and prairies where bison still roam, from the Panhandle's emerald coast to the coral reefs of the Keys. The definitive short list, not the whole directory.