The Most Beautiful Places in Florida
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Florida are Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas), Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and Castillo de San Marcos. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Florida's heritage is older and stranger than its beaches suggest. Spain founded St. Augustine in 1565, making it the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the continental United States, and the peninsula's strategic position between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico drew forts for three centuries. The ground itself shaped what was built: soft shell-stone called coquina and porous coral rock gave builders a local material, while the subtropical climate later lured Gilded Age fortunes to raise winter estates and gardens.
The forts lead the way. Fort Jefferson, on a small key in the Dry Tortugas far west of Key West, is a vast hexagonal brick fortress begun in 1846 and never finished, ringed by a moat and turquoise shallows. Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, completed by Spain in 1695, is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, and its coquina walls absorbed cannon fire rather than shattering.
The twentieth century brought a different ambition. Vizcaya, the Miami winter home of industrialist James Deering, is an Italian Renaissance-style villa on Biscayne Bay with formal gardens and a stone barge in the water. Bok Tower Gardens near Lake Wales surrounds a pink and grey marble carillon tower dedicated in 1929, set in grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. In Coral Gables, the Venetian Pool fills a former coral rock quarry with spring water, framed by Mediterranean-style loggias and a small waterfall.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas) | Star fort | |
| 2 | Vizcaya Museum and Gardens | Manor house | |
| 3 | Castillo de San Marcos | Star fort | |
| 4 | Bok Tower Gardens | Bell tower | |
| 5 | Venetian Pool | Lido |
01 Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas)
Fort Jefferson
United States24.628° N 82.873° W
U.S. National Park Service · Public domain Nearly seventy miles of open sea west of Key West, on a scrap of coral sand called Garden Key, stands the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas.
Did you know? Sand-filled columns inside the walls were meant to filter rainwater into cisterns, but salt leached from the sand and much of the water proved undrinkable.
02 Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
United States · 5.3 km from Miami25.744° N 80.210° W
Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 Vizcaya is an Italian Renaissance villa transplanted to the shore of Biscayne Bay: a palazzo with an open courtyard, formal gardens with fountains and grottoes, and a stone barge lying just offshore in the bay.
Did you know? The estate's telephone system was the first in what is now Miami-Dade County.
03 Castillo de San Marcos
United States · 0.5 km from St. Augustine29.898° N 81.311° W
National Park Service · Public domain The Castillo de San Marcos is a low, pale star of stone on the shore of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida, and the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States.
Did you know? Before the stone fort, Spain built a succession of nine wooden forts along the coast over some 80 years after Francis Drake raided the town with 22 ships in 1586.
04 Bok Tower Gardens
United States · 18.1 km from Winter Haven27.935° N 81.578° W
Averette · CC BY 3.0 On one of the highest points of the Florida peninsula, a pink-and-grey marble tower rises 205 feet above a reflecting pool and a garden of live oaks, palms and azaleas, and from its top a carillon of sixty bells sounds across the orange groves below.
Did you know? The sixty bells never swing: they hang fixed in the eighth-floor bell chamber, and only their clappers move, driven from a keyboard in the room below.
05 Venetian Pool
United States · 3.8 km from Coral Gables25.746° N 80.274° W
Jesper Rautell Balle · CC BY 3.0 Venetian Pool turns a worked-out limestone quarry into a Mediterranean lagoon. Fresh water fills a basin cut from limestone, crossed by a Venetian-style bridge and lined with mooring posts and arcaded buildings; there are caves and grottoes in the rock walls, a waterfall, and an island with palm trees.
Did you know? Phineas Paist had earlier worked as an associate architect on Villa Vizcaya in Florida, working alongside designer Paul Chalfin.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Florida?
- On our list, Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas) ranks first, followed by Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and Castillo de San Marcos.
- What is the oldest fort in Florida?
- Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, completed by Spain in 1695, is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. It was built of coquina, a local stone made of compacted shells.
- Why was Fort Jefferson built in the Dry Tortugas?
- Fort Jefferson was built to guard the shipping lanes and deep anchorage between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Construction began in 1846 and continued for decades, but the fort was never completed.
- What is the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables?
- The Venetian Pool is a public swimming pool created in the 1920s from a coral rock quarry and fed by spring water. Its Mediterranean-style architecture, grottoes and waterfall made it one of the landmarks of Coral Gables.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Florida?
- In our collection, the places in Florida are most often star forts (2), bell towers (1), country houses (1) and lidos (1).
- How many places are on this list in Florida?
- The list covers 5 places.