THE REGISTER

Six white concrete domes standing in the Gulf, several hundred feet offshore from a beach that used to be under them.

A hexagonal brick fortress of 16 million bricks on a sand key 70 miles out to sea, never finished, once a prison for a Lincoln conspirator.

A former research habitat 21 feet down in a lagoon. You scuba to check in. Pizza arrives by diver.

A 50-foot obelisk of 1,500 stones donated from every US state and 21 countries, cemented together in 1943.

A Cold War missile base inside Everglades National Park, with a nuclear-capable missile still in the barn.

Every US president in wax, plus a 60-foot hand-built model of the White House with working chandeliers.

A hundred-year-old sailor doll in a glass case at Fort East Martello. Ask before photographing him.

A cryptid research institute, gift shop, reptile pen, and campground, in one green building on the Tamiami Trail.

A 1906 trading post on stilts at the end of the road, where the outlaw Ed Watson was shot by his neighbours.

A three-storey castle clad in 90,000 discarded aluminium printing plates, with a Spanish galleon restaurant in the moat.

Seven wooden houses standing on pilings a mile out in Biscayne Bay, all that remains of an offshore village.

The actual steamboat from the 1951 Bogart and Hepburn film, restored and still taking passengers up a Key Largo canal.

A submerged theatre from 1947 where performers breathe from hidden air hoses and hold a smile.

A concrete house begun in 1926 with secret passages, a moat, and a cooling system decades ahead of itself.

A 12th-century Spanish cloister, dismantled, shipped in 11,000 numbered crates, and reassembled in Florida.

A 205-foot marble and coquina bell tower on Florida's highest ridge, containing 60 bells and the ashes of the man who built it.

A town of certified mediums, founded 1894, where the directory lists residents by spiritual specialty.

A nine-foot bronze Christ standing on the sea floor in 25 feet of water, arms raised, encrusted in coral.

A town where the Christmas tree stays up all year and the post office postmarks thousands of cards each December.

1,100 tons of coral rock, quarried and stacked by one very small man who would not say how.

An 1880s cattle-drive stop and reputed brothel at a crossroads named Yeehaw Junction. A truck hit it in 2019.

A 1936 roadside zoo of alligators and flamingos, kept almost exactly as it was by the photographer who saved it.

A real 1565 archaeological site wrapped around a spring that a 19th-century promoter decided was Ponce de León's fountain.

You enter through the mouth of a giant concrete alligator. It has been that way since 1962.

Nineteen acres of above-ground vaults, a monument to the USS Maine dead, and a headstone reading 'I told you I was sick'.

America's first drive-through safari, opened 1967. You drive your own car, windows up, through 900 loose animals.

The world's first oceanarium, built in 1938 as an underwater film studio, in a town of about a dozen people.

A tiny island in the Homosassa River, held continuously by spider monkeys since the 1960s.

The smallest working post office in the United States: 61 square feet, formerly an irrigation pipe shed.

A winter neighbourhood of Amish and Mennonite visitors in the middle of Sarasota, moving by adult tricycle and shuffleboard.

The first permanent Ripley's museum, in a 1887 Moorish castle where two women died in a fire in 1944.

A fruit stand that started with a six-year-old and a sign, now selling mamey milkshakes beside a yard of emus and goats.

A 226-foot concrete tower built in 1956 so tourists could look at orange groves that no longer exist.

A canal to cut Florida in half, one third built, cancelled in 1971, now a 110-mile greenway with locks that lead nowhere.

The lakeside cottage where the FBI fought a four-hour gun battle with the Barker gang in 1935. The county moved the whole house by truck.

A 38-foot ring of basins cut into the bedrock at the mouth of the Miami River, roughly 2,000 years old, saved from a condo tower and then covered back over.

A 1929 wooden tower built to house bats that would eat the mosquitoes. The bats left immediately. Irma took the tower in 2017.

A granite monument erected in 1982 to thank the possum for feeding people through hard times.

A Venetian Gothic palace on Sarasota Bay, an art museum, and a 3,800-square-foot miniature circus built over fifty years by one man.

A former 1950s motel converted into a sea turtle hospital, with patients recovering in the swimming pool.

An unincorporated community named after the two eggs local children traded for candy at the general store.

A public swimming pool carved out of a coral rock quarry in 1924, filled from an aquifer and drained every night in summer.

One of the deepest freshwater springs on earth, full of mastodon bones, with a 1930s lodge and glass-bottom boats.

An 87-degree sinkhole spring pushing out nine million gallons a day, with 10,000-year-old human remains at the bottom.

Acres of concrete animals, windmills, fountains, and metal roosters at a crossroads, arranged in ranks.

A prehistoric spring inside a dry cave, entered by a staircase down a hole in a field.

Two hundred life-sized dinosaurs standing in the palmettos off I-4, at slightly wrong scales.

A 92-foot half-orange on Highway 192, selling citrus and citrus-adjacent souvenirs since 1973.

Stop at the white line, shift to neutral, and the car rolls backwards up the slope.

A century-old tropical garden growing fifteen feet below street level in a drained lake bed.

A Greek sponge-diving port on the Gulf, in continuous operation since 1905, still selling what the divers bring up.

The largest Dalí collection outside Spain, in a hurricane-proof concrete box with a 75-foot glass bubble growing out of it.

A brick bench beside a grave. Leave an unopened beer on it overnight and it is said to be empty by morning.

Sixty polydactyl cats with presidential names, legally protected as an exhibit by federal court.

Acres of shells, coral, fudge, taxidermy, and an arcade, operating since 1938.

A residential lot surfaced in several thousand painted bowling balls, and still growing.

A 30-foot fibreglass spiny lobster looming over US-1 at the Rain Barrel Village.

The highest point in Florida, at 345 feet. It is lower than the highest point of every other state, and there is a picnic table.

The only Florida state park offering tours of dry, air-filled caves, hand-dug open by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

A 120-foot limestone sinkhole with its own climate and the bones of extinct animals in the walls.