Our Definitively Biased Guide to the Florida Springs

We have found the Fountain of Youth, folks. It's got nothing to do with botox, fillers, or semaglutides.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

-Raymond Carver

Florida is not commonly associated with holy places. And we’re here to tell you that this, and everything you already know about Florida, is 100% true! No need to read further. Please don’t come here unless you’re looking to retire in a land of cheap AK-47s, invasive iguanas, and catatonic, lobster-skinned snowbirds sunning their backsides next to an overly chlorinated pool. There is no magic here, except for a rodent kingdom known as Disney, which is pillaged daily by a mob of zombie tourists seeking to devour giant turkey legs while simultaneously being brainwashed by misogynistic fairy tales blurted out of speakers built into fake rocks. Seriously, unless you are auditioning to be the next Princess Jasmine after the last one just got sentenced to 10 years for drug trafficking, there’s no need for a visit. Florida is what you already know it to be. It is “God’s waiting room” furnished with a faded, disheveled purple velvet couch, a television/VCR combo playing “The Price is Right” reruns, a sticky, glass coffee table with a few Golfers Digest magazines scattered on top, and an even stickier remote control with only one corroded double A Duracell battery. That is all. No, you cannot change the channel! And no, there isn’t a single heavenly wonder to experience here before it is your time to enter the heavenly gates.

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In September 1493, about 1,200 sailors, colonists, and soldiers joined Christopher Columbus for his second voyage to the so-called “New World.” One of the men on board was a 19-year-old with no official purpose on the boat other than being an entitled noble teenager (read: pre-Instagram influencer) and was listed as a “gentleman volunteer.” His name was Juan Ponce de León, and after killing many Moors in Granada, Spain, he would later become notorious for subjugating and butchering Native Americans. For his role in the massacring of the natives, Ponce de León received a generous land grant from the Spanish royals with an encomienda full of slaves to farm his new estate. He was also appointed governor of Puerto Rico, where he became wealthy from mining gold and plantations.

On top of that, the OG colonizer and mass murderer was awarded the right to set up a colony of his own! He named it “La Florida” in recognition of the verdant landscape and because he “discovered” it in the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). So roughly 14,000 years after men and women had been living in this land, Ponce de Leon was nominated by a king an ocean away to become the first “Florida Man.”

This may have been the most fitting title for de Leon, who, at some point in his life, either had an epiphany or came to the sublime realization that perhaps life was about more than just accumulating riches and killing brown people. Florida Man wondered, “Maybe the point of life is not to die.” So, 500 years before a guy named Bryan Johnson started asking his own organs what they should eat and taking drugs called rapamycin in order to live forever, the legend is that Ponce de Leon went looking for a “Fountain of Youth” in La Florida.

Did he ever find it? We commoners will never know. What we do know is that de Leon was shot and mortally wounded by a poison-tipped arrow, likely from the local Calusa tribe. “Karma is a bitch,” the old Florida expression goes. And so, if you’re still reading this and have endured both our PR blitz for the Villages retirement community and the AP Florida history lesson you likely never learned in school, we will now tell you the most shocking truth of all. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve earned it.

The Fountain of Youth is no myth. That’s right, Poncie boy, eat your heart out.

And yes, we have found it.

And now you, dear subscriber, for the low price of $7.30 a month, get the keys to the kingdom! You will learn about the largest artesian spring in the world, the site of the oldest commercial tourist attraction in Florida, and the only spring in Florida with wild monkeys. Places with indigenous names that you will never be able to pronounce like Itchetucknee, Weeki Wachi, and Chazahowitzka. We will be your guides to the best cave diving sites in the world, a real-life Mermaid show, a pristine river with thousand-year-old fossils that your kids will obsess over for years to come, and for the really brave, the only hot (ok, fine lukewarm) mineral spring in Florida in which you will have to compete with aggressive Eastern European octogenarians for the best spot. If you’re looking for a Fountain of Youth, look no further. We’ve spent actual decades of our lives working on this. Our definitively biased guide to the Florida Springs has arrived.