With the arrival of summer, Florida residents are looking for cool places in this hot state to relax their bodies and minds.
There are many ways and places to take a dip and swim away from the heat—in pools, on beaches, and in water parks. But if you want to avoid crowded beaches and seasonal tourists, I recommend visiting Florida’s best springs with natural and crystal clear water, which are found in national parks throughout the state.
I love that Florida’s natural springs have cool, fresh water, and you can also go fishing, hiking, canoeing, scuba diving, and, most importantly, hiding in the shade of palm trees.
To find out the main features of a great natural spring, I decided to make a route along the national parks with natural springs in Florida and visit all the best of them in this state.
It turned out to be difficult and simple at the same time: simple thanks to the American infrastructure, and difficult because of the huge number of really cool places…
What is The Best Swimming Spring in Florida?
Troy Spring National Park Springs,Looe Key Spring with salt water, and Blue Heron Bridge Spring are the best swimming springs in Florida.
Troy Spring National Park Springs
Troy Spring National Park is located near Branford, Florida, and has a freshwater spring that flows into the Swanney River.
In the park, you can walk along the trails, swim, including with a snorkel, and even see the remains of the Madison, a sunken steamship from the Civil War, underwater!
Looe Key Spring with Salt Water
This place is located about 6 miles from Big Pine Key in Bahia Honda National Park. It is a colorful place with cliffs, tropical fish, and miles of coral reef. This is truly one of the best places to dive. One of the attractions is the British ship HMS Looe, which ran aground here in 1744.
Blue Heron Bridge Spring
The best spring for diving in Florida can be found at Phil Foster Park near Lake Worth in Palm Beach County. Snorkelers and experienced divers alike can enjoy a variety of marine life in the shallow waters.
Shallow-water diving will take you to octopuses, angelfish, seahorses, lobsters, and, when the water gets warmer, manatees. Shoreline access and relatively shallow water make this one of the easiest dives in Florida.
What is the Prettiest Spring in Florida?
Alexander Springs Recreation Area, Salt Springs are the prettiest springs in Florida.
Alexander Springs Recreation Area
Alexander Spring is a crystal-clear turquoise oasis, perfect for hot summer days.
Within the park, visitors can fish, swim, canoe, and even scuba dive, as this is the only spring in the Ocala State Reserve where scuba diving is allowed.
Salt Springs
Salt Springs, part of the Ocala State Preserve, is another treasure among Florida’s springs. The spring stands out for its unique beauty.
The name comes from its water, which contains potassium, magnesium, and sodium salts, due to which its mineralization is higher than that of other natural sources.
Blue Grotto Spring
This is probably the coolest grotto you have ever seen.
The cave is located in the heart of Florida and boasts some of the clearest waters in the state. It is covered with fossils and filled with untouched underwater rocks.
Rainbow springs
Florida’s fourth-largest Rainbow Springs is located in Dunnellon, Florida.
Rainbow Spring is one of the most beautiful springs in Florida, with crystal-clear waters and waterfalls throughout the park.
What is the Warmest Spring in Florida?
Warm Mineral Springs and the Devil’s Den are the warmest spring in Florida.
Devil’s Den
There are countless jokes that say that Central Florida (including Orlando) is the gateway to hell.
The early settlers actually believed it, at least when they encountered the steam billowing from this dry cave near Gainesville.
This underground warm water spring is home to around 2 million-year-old fossils and the remains of a 7,500-year-old human.
Warm Mineral Springs
It is a place in Sarasota, Florida.
This lake is a unique and unrepeatable phenomenon.
Warm Mineral Springs ranks 1st in America and 3rd in the world in terms of mineral concentration and healing properties and surpasses almost all world health resorts, including German Baden-Baden and Czech Karlovy Vary.
The minerals contained in the water help and support the body, and they lead to the normalization of processes and the restoration of redox reactions.
Modern chemistry can already explain all this from the point of view of science, but then, 500 years ago, none of this existed.
It is clear that people believed in the miracle because they saw that a real, gradual transformation of a person is actually taking place: the old skin is smoothed out, the person is losing weight, his wrinkles and lines disappear from the face, many diseases of the stomach and the musculoskeletal system go away, and the person begins to feel like a young person.
I swam in the lake on New Year’s Eve, in January, and in February.
If it was cool, we put on warm bathrobes after leaving the water.
In the hot summer months, a kind of microclimate is established over the lake. No matter how hot it is outside, no one experiences heat while in the water.
However, not everyone trusts the summer, so the seasons have been established on the lake: from September to the end of November and from about February to March to the end of May.
The rest of the time, it is not crowded; in July (and this is the hottest month in Florida), there can be only forty people.
On Saturdays and Sundays, you can expect up to a hundred people. And in the season, people come to the lake from all over the world, and on a typical day, there are up to five hundred people!
We visited the southernmost state of the USA in the spring, in May, and in the fall, in October.
And I can definitely say that a trip to Florida in the spring and early summer is the best option both in terms of prices, not a very large number of tourists, and weather.
Not so hot yet, but already good. And in the fall, you can generally get into one of the hurricanes that regularly attack the southeast coast of Florida.