Camping

Most Florida springs drop off fast into a deep boil. Alexander is the exception: the basin shelves gradually across a sandy bottom, so toddlers can wade a long way out while older kids swim to the vent. That single feature makes it the spring to pick with a mixed-age group. It is also one of the few springs where snorkelling is genuinely rewarding at shallow depth, and canoe rentals run the Alexander Springs Creek downstream through palm hammock. Being inside the national forest, it is quieter than the state parks nearer Orlando.

Anastasia gives you two completely different waters within walking distance. The Atlantic beach is wide and firm enough to walk for miles, with real surf. Salt Run, the tidal lagoon behind it, is protected, waist-deep in most places and the best beginner paddling in the region - rentals for kayaks, paddleboards and small sailboats operate there in season. The campground is one of the best in the state system, tucked into the maritime hammock. St. Augustine’s old town and its fort are ten minutes away, which makes this an easy base for a few days.

Most of the Keys have very little actual beach; Bahia Honda is the exception and it is why the park fills early. Sandspur Beach shelves so gently that children can walk out a long way in warm, clear water, and Calusa Beach on the other side is even calmer. The ruined Flagler railroad bridge arcs overhead, half of it removed, which makes the whole place look like a film set. Snorkelling is decent close in around the rocks though not reef-quality. It is a two-hour drive from Key Largo, so this works best as part of a Keys trip rather than a day out from Miami.

Seven Seas is the public balneario nearest the Fajardo ferry terminal, and it is a genuinely good family beach in its own right rather than just a place to wait for a boat. The bay is protected, so the water is shallow, warm and calm a long way out, and it has the full public-beach kit: lifeguards, restrooms, showers, picnic shelters, kiosks and camping. From the eastern end a short trail leads over the headland to Playa Escondida and Playa Colora, two rougher, emptier coves worth the twenty-minute walk. The Laguna Grande bio bay tours launch nearby.

The Blackwater is tannin-stained but clean, and it runs over pure white sand that piles into broad bars on the inside of every bend. That geography makes it close to ideal for paddling with children: the current is gentle, the water is usually shallow enough to stand in, and there is a natural place to pull out and swim every few hundred yards. Local outfitters run canoe, kayak and tube trips with shuttles, in lengths from an hour to a full day. The park itself has a campground and a short trail through Atlantic white cedar. Water levels matter - too low and you drag.

Cinnamon Bay is a long stretch of sand inside the national park with more room to spread out than Trunk or Maho, and enough wave action to be fun for children without being rough. A small cay sits offshore within easy snorkelling range for stronger swimmers. Behind the beach a short self-guided trail loops through the ruins of a Danish sugar plantation, with the mill and estate house walls standing in the bush - a genuinely interesting half hour that puts the island’s colonial history somewhere children will actually encounter it. Watersports rentals and a campground operate on site.

Curry Hammock has the calmest paddling water in the Keys - a shallow protected bay where the bottom is visible the whole way and there is nowhere for a novice to get into trouble. Boats are available at the launch, but not from the park - a third-party self-serve kiosk runs on a QR code and a smartphone, so have signal and a card. The beach is small and rarely crowded, which is the trade for it being less spectacular than Bahia Honda. In autumn the park hosts a raptor migration count, and on a good October day thousands of hawks and falcons funnel down the Keys directly overhead. The campground is one of the harder Florida reservations to get.

Florida’s highest waterfall is not what you would expect: a stream runs across flat ground, reaches the edge of a cylindrical sinkhole a hundred feet deep, and falls seventy-three feet into it. The water then vanishes into the aquifer, and its destination has never been established. A boardwalk and stairs descend to viewing platforms inside the sink. It is a short walk, well shaded, and genuinely strange. The fall depends entirely on rainfall - after a dry month it can be a trickle or nothing, so ask when you call. There is a small spring-fed lake for swimming and a campground.

Flamenco earns the superlatives. A mile-long horseshoe of white sand enclosing water that grades from clear to turquoise to deep blue, with a reef at the eastern end for snorkelling and surf gentle enough for children through most of the bay. The odd landmark is a rusting US Navy tank left on the sand from when Culebra was a bombing range, now covered in graffiti and universally photographed. Facilities exist - kiosks, restrooms, showers, camping - which is unusual for a beach this good. Getting there means the Culebra ferry from Ceiba or a small plane, and the ferry is the constraint.

Florida is riddled with caves but almost all of them are underwater; Florida Caverns is the one dry cave with public tours. Rangers lead groups through decorated rooms of stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws and flowstone, on a paved path with lighting, taking about forty-five minutes. It stays at 65 degrees, which in a Panhandle August is the main attraction. There are low sections that require ducking, so it is not stroller-friendly. Tour tickets are sold same-day on a first-come basis and sell out on holiday weekends. Above ground there are trails, a spring-fed swimming area and camping.

Fort Clinch is one of the best preserved nineteenth-century masonry forts in the country, and unusually you can walk almost all of it - the ramparts, the galleries, the kitchen, the bunk rooms. Rangers in period uniform staff it daily and stay in character, which children find either fascinating or unnerving. The beach below the fort is a well-known spot for finding fossilised shark teeth, especially at low tide near the jetty. Two campgrounds sit in the park, one on the Atlantic and one under a canopy of live oak and Spanish moss. The road in through the maritime forest is worth the drive on its own.

Fort De Soto regularly turns up on best-beach-in-America lists, but the reason it belongs on a family list is North Beach’s lagoon - a shallow protected pool separated from the Gulf by a sandbar, where the water is warm, still and waist-deep a long way out. There is a genuine fort to climb over with its original mortars, seven miles of paved trail, a two-mile canoe trail through mangroves, and a large dog park with its own dog beach. The campground sits on the water. It is a county park, so entry is cheap.

Ginnie is privately owned, which means it charges more than the state parks and allows things they do not - most obviously camping right on the riverbank and tubing without a shuttle. The springs themselves are exceptional: Ginnie Spring proper is a large basin whose clarity is genuinely startling, and Devil’s Eye and Devil’s Ear are the entrances to a cave system that draws technical divers from around the world. For families the draw is the swimming and the drift down the Santa Fe on a tube, with a shuttle back from the take-out. Two things to know before you commit. It is expensive - day admission runs about $40 a head, so a family of four is $160 through the gate before tube hire. And it has historically been a loud drinking scene at summer weekends; an alcohol and open-container policy introduced in 2026 was aimed at that, so check the current rules rather than either assumption. Midweek is quieter regardless.

Grayton has the Panhandle’s signature combination - sand so white it is uncomfortable to look at without sunglasses, and water that genuinely reads as emerald green in the right light. What makes it worth choosing over the identical beach either side is Western Lake, one of only a few dozen coastal dune lakes in the world. The lake sits directly behind the dunes, occasionally breaks through to the Gulf, and is calm brackish water you can paddle a kayak across while the children swim. Kayak and paddleboard rentals are on site, and the campground is well shaded.

Florida does not really do rapids, which is why the small run of Class II water on the Hillsborough draws people from across the state. You can watch it from a suspension footbridge without getting in a boat. Canoe and kayak rentals run a calmer stretch upstream through cypress and oak, with alligators and turtles as standard. The park is one of Florida’s original Civilian Conservation Corps builds from the 1930s and the stonework shows it. Do not come here to swim: the park’s pool has been closed since 2022 and there are no current plans to reopen it, and the river itself is not a swimming river. Parts of the trail network, including a section of the Rapids Trail, have also been closed - ring the park before building a day around any one of them. The shaded campground is good.

The Loxahatchee was the first river in Florida designated Wild and Scenic, and the upper stretch running through Jonathan Dickinson is genuinely wild - cypress, sabal palm, alligators and no development. Canoes and kayaks rent at the river camp, and a narrated boat tour runs upstream to Trapper Nelson’s homestead, the cabin of a man who lived off this river for decades and became a local legend. Away from the water, Hobe Mountain is an ancient dune with a tower on top, and at 86 feet it counts as one of the higher points in south Florida - the view runs to the Atlantic.

The Juniper Run is the most memorable paddle in central Florida and the least suitable for beginners. Seven miles of creek so narrow that in places you push off both banks, with fallen logs to duck and no way out once you start - reckon on four hours. A concession runs rentals and a shuttle; if you bring your own boat you must launch before 1pm and only 30 private vessels are allowed on the run each day, so it is worth a phone call first. Older kids love it; it is genuinely a bad idea with a five-year-old. The swimming area is a separate and much gentler proposition, a stone-walled pool built by the Civilian Conservation Corps around the spring boil, with the old millhouse and its water wheel still standing above it.

Lithia Springs is the closest real spring to Tampa and it is set up for families rather than divers: the swimming area is enclosed, shallow at the edges, sandy underfoot and shaded around the rim, so it works well with children who are not strong swimmers. The water holds 72 degrees. It is a Hillsborough County park, so entry is cheap, and there is a decent campground on the Alafia River alongside. The pool closes periodically for water quality after heavy rain, and it hits capacity on summer weekends, so call before making the drive.

Manatee Springs sits where a big spring meets the Suwannee, and the boardwalk that follows the run to the river passes through genuine cypress swamp - knees, dark water, and enough shade that it stays comfortable in August. Manatees come up the run in winter when the Suwannee turns cold, and the same seasonal trade applies as at Blue Spring: their presence closes the swimming. Outside manatee season the basin is open, clear and popular with divers heading into the cave system below. Campgrounds sit under the oaks nearby.

Myakka has two things nowhere else in the state park system has. The first is a canopy walkway - a suspension bridge strung eighty-five feet up through oak and palm, with a tower above it that puts you over the treetops. The second is the lake, shallow and full of alligators, crossed by large flat-bottomed airboats that run as narrated tours. Around them are 37,000 acres of prairie and hammock, a birdwalk out over the marsh, kayak rentals and a campground. The weir at the lake outflow is a reliable spot to see a dozen alligators at once in the dry season.