Blue Spring State Park
First-magnitude spring holding steady at seventy-two degrees, a winter refuge where hundreds of manatees gather.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Blue Spring State Park near Orlando opens in 1970, when a researcher wading into the spring run counted just fourteen manatees at a spot that was then a noisy fish camp. It follows the spring's earlier life as a steamboat stop, with the plantation house orange grower Louis Thursby built here in 1872 still standing, and traces how a 1971 visit by French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and his film crew began to change what people thought this place was for. Cousteau titled his footage of the sheltering manatees The Forgotten Mermaids.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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