FLFlorida Fun Facts

The highest natural point in Florida is Britton Hill, 345 feet up near the Alabama line. That is the lowest state high point in the country, and it means no place in Florida is more than 60 miles from salt water. The state is essentially a limestone shelf with cities on it.

Facts most people get wrong

• Key West is not the southernmost point of the United States. Hawaii holds that title. Key West is the southernmost city of the continental US, and even there the famous painted buoy is not the real southern tip, which sits on Navy property at Truman Annex.
• Florida has crocodiles too. South Florida is the only place on earth where American alligators and American crocodiles live side by side in the wild.
• Tallahassee is not a compromise nobody explains. It became capital in 1824 precisely because it fell halfway between the two population centers of the time, St. Augustine and Pensacola, and riders from each rode toward the middle to pick the spot.
• The state is not all on Eastern time. Everything west of the Apalachicola River in the Panhandle runs on Central time, so Pensacola is an hour behind Miami.
• Kansas is not the flattest state. A 2014 study published in the Geographical Review measured Florida as the flattest in the country and ranked Kansas seventh.
• The orange industry is a shadow of its old self. Citrus greening disease was found in Florida in 2005, and production has fallen roughly 90 percent from its late 1990s peak of more than 240 million boxes.

Records and firsts

• Florida has the longest coastline in the lower 48 at about 1,350 miles, plus roughly 663 miles of sand beach, more than any other state outside Alaska.
• St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, 42 years older than Jamestown.
• The state counts 4,510 islands of ten acres or more, second only to Alaska.
• Everglades National Park, established in 1947, protects about 1.5 million acres and is the largest subtropical wilderness in the country.
• Florida has more golf courses than any other state, well past 1,100, and Palm Beach County is the largest county by area east of the Mississippi River.
• The stretch between Tampa and Orlando gets more lightning strikes per square mile than anywhere else in the country, which is why locals call it Lightning Alley.

Geography that surprises

• Key West is closer to Havana, about 90 miles, than it is to Miami, about 130 miles by air and considerably more by road.
• The Overseas Highway runs 113 miles from the mainland to Key West across 42 bridges, including the Seven Mile Bridge, on a route first laid as a railroad in 1912.
• Lake Okeechobee covers about 730 square miles yet averages only nine feet deep, shallow enough that wind can push the water noticeably to one side.
• Walt Disney World occupies about 25,000 acres near Orlando, roughly the footprint of San Francisco, and the company quietly assembled it through shell corporations to keep land prices down.
• Pensacola in the western Panhandle sits far closer to Montgomery, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, than to Miami. Florida runs close to 500 miles north to south and about 360 miles east to west.

Where the name comes from

Juan Ponce de León sighted the coast in April 1513 during the Spanish Easter season known as Pascua Florida, the feast of flowers, and named the land La Florida after the holiday rather than after the vegetation. It is one of the oldest surviving European place names anywhere in the United States. The Sunshine State nickname is far newer, adopted as the official state nickname in 1970 and printed on license plates long before that. Tallahassee, by contrast, keeps a Native name from an Apalachee or Muskogean word usually translated as "old fields" or "old town."

Bordering states

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