Happenin’
Places › Florida › Southwest Florida › Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens
Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens

Photo: Exupery67 / CC BY 4.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens

Naples, FL · Southwest Florida

About

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.

Highlights

Primate Expedition Cruise on Lake VictoriaCentury-old Caribbean Gardens botanical treesFlorida panthers and big catsGiraffe feeding

Getting there

Related places

Edison and Ford Winter Estates Attractions

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.

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 Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens.

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.