South Florida also has significant populations of people from Cuba, Haiti , and Jamaica. Additionally, Florida is known for its large retirement communities. In addition to its biodiversity, large cities, and famous theme parks, Florida is also known for its well-developed university system. There are a number of large public universities in the state, such as Florida State University and the University of Florida, as well as many large private universities and community colleges.
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List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Amanda Briney. Geography Expert. Amanda Briney, M. Updated December 04, Featured Video. The coastal plains contain sandy beaches, islands, and coral reefs. In the south, you can canoe through the famous Everglades National Park —swampy, wildlife-filled marshland that covers 1. Off the southernmost tip of the state are the Florida Keys, a group of about 1, tiny islands called an archipelago.
Want to island-hop? No problem. A causeway and 42 bridges connect the various keys. More than types of native trees grow in the state, from apple and cherry trees in the north to mangrove forests in the swamps. Three centuries later, newly-built railroads allowed growers to ship oranges across the United States.
Today the state provides oranges for most of the orange juice sold in the country. Sugarcane, fish, petroleum, and phosphate used for fertilizer are also top natural resources from Florida. The square-mile park in the city of Orlando has more than 60, employees and welcomes more than 62, visitors every day.
You can see an actual rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, where rockets have been taking off since Twelve hours more by rail takes one to the southern tip of the state. Thus, within two days' time, one may change his winter environment from arctic to tropic; from a zero mercury to one sixty or eighty degrees above; from ice and snow to gentle skies, unchilled waters, everblooming flowers, and singing birds-and all this without leaving the mainland of the United States.
As soon as the weather begins to be wintry and disagreeable in the North it begins to be a happy medium in Florida, neither too cool nor too warm. The leading hotels generally open early in January and close four months later. This is the period when traveling facilities are at their best.
The Florida climate is remarkably equable. You do not freeze to death in winter, nor are your energies sapped by a sizzling sun in summer. It is true that the summer days are often hot, but invariably at sundown there is a breeze which makes sleeping a comfort. The equalizing force which makes both the summer heat and the winter cold less violent is furnished by the Gulf Stream which flows out into the Atlantic between Cuba and Florida.
The Gulf Stream is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon, and its volume is fully a thousand times as great. The water is bluer than that of the surrounding sea, and the line of demarkation in its earlier course is very distinct. On either side and under its warm current is the cold water of the rest of the sea. The rainy season is in summer. It does not consist of a steady downpour, but of afternoon thunder showers which come up in the heat of the day.
The normal rainy season lasts about four months, but may continue much longer. In winter clear days are the rule, but the weather is variable, and sometimes there are rainy winters and comparatively dry summers. There are those who claim that the Florida summer is more genial than that torrid season at the North, that the winds are spiced with the resin of the woods, and that it is characterized by a shining equableness and a general blueness and balminess.
Really it is often blisteringly and blazingly hot, and smites the toiler with irresistible languor. You seem about to ignite, and only by means of copious drafts of water and abundant perspiration is the conflagration prevented. However, a person gets somewhat acclimated in time, and learns to accept the heat with a degree of equanimity so that it no longer seems an achievement simply to exist.
I have mentioned the thunderstorms as a feature of the summer. After a sweltering windless morning, clouds appear in the blue, lifting higher and higher their beetling forms like vast snow-clad mountains tops. It is a stirring sight—the splendid energies of the air, the sweeping of the shadows, and the dramatic bursts of lightning.
The ground trembles with the thunder and soon the world is blotted out by the driving rain. When the storm passes on, the tree-toads awake and begin to rasp in every tree, and the frogs in every pool.
As the summer progresses the rains increase in frequency. The weather falls into a lamentable aqueous intemperance, the air becomes a habitat of vapors. There are looming clouds with sluggish raindrift beneath much of the time. The soil gradually fills and exudes water like a soaked sponge, every hollow is transformed into a pool or a lake.
Wherever you go you must wade. When the sun comes out it blazes on a waste of wetness, and fills the air with steam. The stranger feels much inclined to abandon the country for a while to the elements and the frogs. Florida weather has its flaws. Nevertheless, one can live out of doors during almost every day in the year. The cool breezes from the Atlantic or the Gulf are a feature in summer, and sunny inviting days predominate in winter. But persons who come to Florida with the expectation of spending their midwinter in white linen lying on beds of roses under blossoming trees and palms, should change this delusion for the far finer and truer notion of a temperature just cool enough to save a man from degenerating into a luxurious vegetable of laziness, and just warm enough to be nerve-quieting and tranquilizing.
Even if it chances that you have to endure a three days' chilly drizzling rainstorm, you can take comfort in thinking that the North is having a driving snowstorm.
When Florida has a brisk cold spell the North has a bitter freeze. Florida has the lowest annual death rate of any state in the Union. Many persons are benfited by spending the winter there, and would be still more benefited if they made it their permanent abode. Such are those who suffer constitutionally from cold, who are bright and well only in hot weather, whom the Northern winter chills and benumbs, till, in the spring they are in the condition of a frost-bitten hot-house plant.
On the contrary, persons who are debilitated and wretched during hot weather, and whom cool weather braces and gives vigor have no call to Florida. Improvement in health depends on taking advantage of what Florida has to offer, which is life in the open air with unlimited opportunities for activity. To keep indoors taking no regular exercise, and with the mind and body unemployed offers little chance to gain.
The climate cannot be too highly praised for children. The winter is one long out-door play-spell for them, and in general they are wholly free from coughs, colds, and other ailments. They can run about, row in boats, go fishing, and seek flowers in the woods with the greatest possible pleasure and the least possible discomfort. When you are planning a visit to the peninsula, remember that Florida women buy furs for the winter and wear them too.
It is not a land of perpetual warmth. All the northern half of the state is more or less subject to frosty nights, cold winds, and chilling rains from the middle of December to the middle of February.
The likelihood of frost decreases as you go south, but every part of the mainland gets an occasional touch. Not until you are well down toward Key West do you reach the frost's limits. The author of a book of travel published in was detained for ten winter days at St.
Augustine because the packet schooner which ran regularly to Charleston could not get out of the harbor on account of northeast winds. He says: "Nothing can be worse than to find oneself imprisoned in this little village with a cold piercing wind drifting the sand along the streets and into his eyes, with sometimes a chance at a fire morning and evening, and sometimes a chance to wrap up in a cloak and shiver without any, and many times too cold to keep warm by walking in the sunshine.
No getting away. Blow, blow, blow! Northeast winds are sovereigns here, keeping everything at a standstill except the tavern-bill, which runs against all winds and weather.
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