Everything in Tampa Bay, by category.
29 places
Clearwater's wide ribbon of ultra-fine white quartz sand meets calm, bath-warm Gulf water, with a walkable strip of cafes right behind it. Every evening the free Sunsets at Pier 60 festival fills the sand with buskers and makers before the sky goes pink. It is the easy do-everything Pinellas beach day: park once and stay through sunset.
Siesta Key Beach near Sarasota runs on sand that is roughly 99 percent quartz, so fine and white it stays cool underfoot even on a hot afternoon and squeaks as you walk. Spread a towel on the wide flats, swim the calm turquoise Gulf shallows, then ride the free trolley into Siesta Key Village for dinner. Drumming circles draw crowds to the soft sand at sunset.
St. Pete Beach fronts the Gulf with a long ribbon of white sand and some of Florida's most reliable sunsets, all under the pink, 1928 silhouette of the Don CeSar hotel. Swim the warm shallows, walk the quieter sands down at Pass-a-Grille, or join a dolphin watching charter from Merry Pier. Stay through dusk, when the sky over the water turns to color.
A roadless barrier island off Dunedin, reachable only by the ferry from Honeymoon Island or your own boat, which is exactly why its three miles of powder-white sand stay so quiet. Spread out on the wide Gulf beach, paddle the mangrove kayak trail, and work the shell-strewn flats most day-trippers skip. Just watch the last ferry back, or you are there for the night.
One of Florida's oldest and largest state parks, Myakka spreads 37,000 acres of wetlands, prairies, and hammocks along the slow Myakka River east of Sarasota. Climb the canopy walkway, the first public treetop trail in North America, suspended 25 feet up with a tower above the oaks, then board one of the giant airboats for an alligator-lined cruise on Upper Myakka Lake. Winter brings cooler air and crowds of wading birds.
Fort De Soto Park spreads across five connected keys at the mouth of Tampa Bay, pairing nearly three miles of soft white-sand beach with a Spanish-American War coastal fort. Climb the old gun batteries, then cast off the Gulf Pier or paddle the canoe trail through mangroves. Ferries run from here to undeveloped Egmont Key and Shell Key, and the park has its own beach dog park.
Thrillist crowned this Seminole Heights brewhouse the best in Florida, and the barrel-aged imperial stouts are why people sleep in the parking lot for a release. The taproom runs 24 taps under a sprawling mural of tumbling chairs, with green picnic tables out front and label art from the same hands that paint the cans. Come for a pastry stout aged in bourbon, cognac, or whiskey barrels, stay for the theme nights.
The brewery that anchored St. Petersburg's EDGE District, named to VinePair's list of the best in America by a panel of beer pros. The lagers are the reason to come, crisp and built for Florida heat, while the foeders and barrels at sister Webb's City Cellar next door push mixed-culture ferments and wild blends. Pull up a chair in the biergarten under the painted brick mural and the string lights.
The brewery that put Tampa on the national craft map, pouring since 2009 from the West Spruce Street warehouse where founder Joey Redner first brewed Jai Alai IPA, the citrus-forward house beer now shipped across 39 states. The taproom keeps more than 20 lines flowing, and every March the cult Hunahpu's Day imperial stout draws beer hunters from across the country. Cigar City's stack of Great American Beer Festival medals backs up the reputation, but the real pull is drinking these beers steps from the tanks that made them.
Jim Barrie pours like the old country, brewing mostly German and Czech lagers and pulling them from imported side-pull faucets that crown each stein with a dense pillow of foam. The copper bartop and Ybor biergarten have earned two World Beer Cup gold medals, including one for the Family Tradition Vienna lager that anchors the menu. It is a lager house that takes the style seriously without making you feel like you have to.
Coppertail set up its tanks inside a 100-year-old Ybor City building that once canned olives and bottled mayonnaise, and the bar's foot rail is the old train track they unearthed during the build. The Free Dive IPA, a citrus-forward pour they tapped on opening day, has anchored the lineup ever since, with the Belgian-style Unholy Tripel waiting for a longer night. Take the brewery tour to see the production floor working behind the taproom.
Mike and Leigh Harting started brewing in 2013 to perfect a beer-battered fish recipe, then asked how many pints it would take to put their three daughters through college. The answer turned into one of Florida's largest independent breweries, an 18,000-square-foot warehouse where 42 rotating taps pour across three bars, the concrete one cast in a single piece with the floor. There are no TVs, just game tables built by the founders' grandfather, barrel-aging racks, live music, and the flagship Beach Blonde Ale.
Florida's oldest distributing microbrewery has been pouring on Douglas Avenue since 1995, and its string-lit biergarten still fills nightly under a mural that reads Keep Dunedin Weird. Pull up a picnic table for the Apricot Peach Ale, then drift inside, where two stages host touring acts and a Wednesday open jam in one of the area's most beloved live-music rooms.
Greg Rapp chases the styles most brewers skip, reviving German gose, grodziskie, and other near forgotten recipes that trace back to his great grandfather's brewery near Dresden. The 40 taps in this Seminole warehouse rotate through that obscure roster, and the salty, tart gose took Best of Show at the Florida Beer Championship. Order a flight under the lit medallion and taste a few centuries of brewing history you won't find anywhere else in Tampa Bay.
Tampa Bay Brewing Company has been brewing since 1995, which makes it one of Florida's oldest independent craft breweries, and the Westchase brewhouse is where the beer actually gets made. Order the Reef Donkey APA, the citrusy pale ale that took bronze at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival, and drink it a few feet from the fermentation tanks. This is the full production brewery and kitchen, so the patio fills up with people working through beer-infused plates and a couple dozen rotating taps.
A barrier island three miles off the Tarpon Springs sponge docks, reachable only by boat or ferry, with no road, no high-rise, and no provisions waiting on the other side. Miles of white sand run unraked along the Gulf, heaped with shells and backed by ten-foot dunes and an 1887 lighthouse on the southern tip; bald eagles and oystercatchers work the shallows while you do your own packing in and out. Bring water, claim a primitive campsite, and let the surf be the only thing you hear after the last ferry leaves.
Madeira Beach is the kind of Gulf town where dinner is a barefoot walk from the sand, and the whole scene runs on John's Pass, the inlet a hurricane carved between here and Treasure Island in 1848. Wander the 1,100-foot wooden boardwalk past seafood shacks and tiki bars while the working fishing fleet, dolphin cruises and charter boats come and go beneath the drawbridge. When you have had your fill of the docks, the wide white-sand beach and its rows of umbrellas are a short stroll west.
One of Florida's original state parks, carved out by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, this is one of the few places in the state where the river actually has rapids. The Hillsborough drops over a limestone ledge into a frothing Class II run, and a 1936 CCC wire suspension footbridge still sways across the water above it. Beyond the rapids you get more than seven miles of shaded trails through cypress and oak hammock, canoe and kayak rentals on calmer stretches, and a weekend-staffed replica of Fort Foster from the Second Seminole War.
Four miles of white Gulf sand wrap this barrier island off Dunedin, where the water runs pale green and shells pile up along the wilder north beach. Inland, the Osprey Trail winds through one of Florida's last virgin slash pine stands, with nesting ospreys overhead and gopher tortoises lumbering across the path. Catch the passenger ferry from the causeway to undeveloped Caladesi Island next door, or stay for a sunset that drops straight into the Gulf.
Busch Gardens wraps a working African animal park around some of the tallest, fastest roller coasters in the Southeast, so you can watch giraffes and zebras graze the Serengeti Plain in the morning and ride a dive coaster straight down a cliff after lunch. The grounds are themed as a tour of the continent, from the Moroccan bazaar at the gate to lion and hyena habitats along the Edge of Africa walk. Tucked just off Tampa, it pairs a serious zoo with a serious thrill park, which is a combination almost no other place in Florida tries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
