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Highlands Hammock State Park

Photo: Brandon Moore (Raskuly) / CC BY 4.0 · source

🌲 Forests

Highlands Hammock State Park

Sebring, FL · Central Florida

About

Four miles west of Sebring sits one of Florida's first state parks, where a boardwalk threads a bald cypress swamp past trees that were already ancient when the Spanish arrived. Walk the catwalk over black water where alligators drift and barred owls call, then drive the three-mile loop past oaks so broad it takes a few people holding hands to ring one. The Civilian Conservation Corps crews who cut these trails in the 1930s left behind a museum and a hushed, cathedral feel that still holds.

Highlights

Boardwalk and historic catwalk through an old-growth bald cypress swampThree-mile loop drive linking nine short nature trailsThousand-year-old cypress and one of Florida's largest live oaksCivilian Conservation Corps Museum in a 1930s CCC-built structureAlligators, white-tailed deer, gopher tortoises, and wading birds

Getting there

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Part of these collections

Curated guides that feature Highlands Hammock State Park.

Florida State Parks26 places

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.