 An escape to Pensacola Beach brings you to a barrier island with an abundance of natural, untouched beauty where miles of uncluttered, sugar-white sand beaches are lapped by the emerald-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Welcome to a landscape dominated by sand dunes and sea oats, not canyons of condos, hotels, or souvenir shops, and washed by gulf waters so clear you can see your toes on the ocean floor.
Pensacola Beach, a quaint, family-oriented beach town with 3,000 year-round residents, nestles on Santa Rosa Island with the Gulf of Mexico at its front door and the waters of Santa Rosa Sound at its back. To the east and west, the natural, unsullied beaches of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. On these beaches in the spring, turtles come ashore to lay their eggs and a variety of birds, from terns to osprey, make their homes.
Man has also left his mark on these sands and that human history is personified by Fort Pickens, a massive, pre-Civil War brick fortress guarding the pass into Pensacola Bay. Fort Pickens, unlike its counterpart Fort Barrancas on the mainland, the current site of Pensacola Naval Air Station, remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War. In later years Geronimo, the famed apache chief, was imprisoned in Fort Pickens along with several of his wives, one of whom is buried in the nearby national cemetery.
Park rangers lead lantern-lit tours of the fort where you can see history through the eyes of the soldiers that protected our deep-water harbor in the 1800s. Also at hand are escorted nature walks for you to familiarize yourself with the island’s plant and animal life, coming to know of the worlds existing in the brackish marshes hidden among the dunes. Or you can wander the isolated beaches almost alone, accompanied only by a curious ghost crab that peeks from his burrow or eyed by a pod of dolphins rolling just offshore.
Strolling along the Florida National Scenic Trail within the national seashore, you will be shaded by tall pines and gnarled live oaks. The trail gives avid bird watchers and novices alike the chance to spot the great blue heron and several brown pelicans. During the avian migrations in the fall and spring the thin strand of Santa Rosa Island is a temporary home to great crested flycatchers, warblers, and tanagers. October brings another natural spectacle as thousands upon thousands of migrating Monarch butterflies flutter about the island.
Though it is on a barrier island sculpted continually by wind and tide, Pensacola Beach is better than ever thanks to a recently completed $20 million nourishment project that added 200 feet of beach to an eroding shoreline. Because the sands of Santa Rosa Island are so purely white, a product of quartz broken down and over the millennia and washed from the mountain-born headwaters of the Apalachicola River, extreme care was taken to make certain the new sand matched the color and grain-size of the existing, sugar-white variety. Besides its unmatched color, the sands of Santa Rosa Island are also known for their sound. Walk along the soft, white sand and it squeaks, a phenomenon known by locals as “singing sand.”
For those who want to take home something more than a good tan or the memory of an ocean-side stroll, the Pensacola Beach Fishing Pier, the longest fishing pier on the Gulf of Mexico, offers a chance to catch red snapper, tuna, mackerel, or cobia. The pier offers tackle rental and bait along with cleaning stations and a friendly, family-oriented atmosphere. If fishing doesn’t hook you, a dollar allows you to walk the quarter-mile to pier’s end for an unsurpassed view of the sunset.
For those who like their fish on a plate instead of a hook, Pensacola Beach has a variety of tastes from family-friendly restaurants featuring live music and playgrounds for the kids to trendy dining rooms overlooking sand dunes and salt water to raw bars serving oysters to the most discriminating beach bum.
Each year also brings to the beach the Pensacola Beach Air Show featuring the world-famous Blue Angels, the festive Mardi Gras and Christmas parades, sand sculpting contests, and one of the nation’s foremost triathlons. With their friendly ways, the people of Pensacola Beach welcome everyone to their festivals and work hard to make sure you feel like a local for the day. But in the end, it is the pristine shoreline, the miles of uncrowded beach and the laid-back attitude of a barrier island that can seem caught somewhere out of time and a world away, that draws visitors back to Pensacola Beach and Santa Rosa Island year after year.
Come be a local for a day, a week, a month or a lifetime.
For more information, call the Pensacola Beach Visitors Information Center at (800) 635-4803 or go online to www.VisitPensacolaBeach.com.
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