Wakulla Spring

Wakulla Spring is one of the largest and deepest freshwater springs in the world, a round basin about fifteen miles south of Tallahassee that opens into a flooded cave system divers have followed for more than thirty miles. The main vent lies roughly 185 feet down, and the passages beyond it run north under the Woodville Karst Plain to Leon Sinks, so the spring is really the outlet of a buried river. The water rises at a steady temperature near 70 degrees all year, which is why manatees crowd into the basin in cold snaps. The cave floor is an Ice Age boneyard. A mastodon skeleton recovered from the spring in 1930 was mounted and is displayed at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, and divers have since found the bones of other extinct animals from a time when sea level was far lower and the land around the spring was dry. The industrialist Edward Ball bought the spring and the surrounding forest in the 1930s and built the Wakulla Springs Lodge, which opened in 1937. Hollywood used the clear water for underwater scenes, including Tarzan pictures of the late 1930s and early 1940s and Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954. The state bought the property in 1986. The clarity that made it famous has become rare. Since the 1990s the water has often run dark with tannins or clouded by nutrients, and the glass-bottom boats now run only on days when the vent can actually be seen.