A Southwest Florida town that really runs on sunshine
Along a dirt road leading into Florida’s past, I stopped to marvel at its future, or at least one vision of it. I was headed to Babcock Ranch EcoTours, where visitors pay to tour a working ranch and swampy backwoods on a state-owned preserve, when I pulled over to peer through a chainlink fence onto the edge of a spectacular sea of solar panels — 343,000 to be exact, stretching across about 440 acres.
While the 75-megawatt facility owned by Florida Power & Light attracts no fanfare here, a few miles down State Road 31 its primary customer, Babcock Ranch, has been making headlines for a while. The master-planned development in Southwest Florida, between Punta Gorda and Fort Myers, touts itself as the nation’s first solar-powered town. It welcomed its first residents in January and hopes to reach 500 by the end of the year. Eventually, about 50,000 people are expected to live in its neighborhoods, scattered around a Town Center and commercial district.
Babcock Ranch’s official grand opening is March 10, nearly a year after its “soft opening,” which drew upward of 20,000 visitors. The curious can stop by anytime to visit the information center, tour model homes and even hitch a ride on a self-driving shuttle, which eventually will be part of what is being hailed as the nation’s first autonomous shuttle network.
On a springlike day in late December, I checked out both the ranch and the town, which felt a little like hopping from Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Jungle Cruise over to Epcot’s Project Tomorrow. It might be tempting to pit the land against the town in a battle of preservation vs. development, but the story is not so simple. For one thing, the land isn’t pristine. Babcock Ranch was owned by Edward Babcock, a lumber baron and former Pittsburgh mayor who bought the spread in 1914. In the 1930s, Edward’s son, Fred, added vegetable farming and an earlier incarnation of swamp tours.
In 2005, Fred’s heirs, who died in 1997, sold their 91,000 acres to Florida developer Syd Kitson, who then sold off 73,000 acres of the land to the state in a $350 million transaction heralded at the time as Florida’s biggest-ever preservation deal.
The result was a parcel of conservation land now called Babcock Ranch Preserve, where the tours are held. In 2016, the state turned over much of the land management to Tarpon Blue, a private cattle company, and announced plans to increase recreational offerings. For now, there is the swamp tour — a 1.5-mile walking trail and 16 miles of equestrian trails.
‘In the woods’
I started my visit at the preserve, which includes a gift shop and rustic restaurant, and hopped aboard a “swamp buggy” (a stripped-down school bus in camouflage paint) to explore some of Florida’s flora and fauna. A couple of dozen tourists, from kids to grandparents, bounced along dirt roads and forest floors, and splashed through swamps as our guide and driver, Terry Covert, expertly spotted wildlife among the scrub palmettos, slash pines and sabal palms and broomsedge.
We had traveled only for a couple of minutes before the first shriekworthy sighting.
“Look at those little alligator hatchlings,” Covert said, stopping the bus so we could peer excitedly out the open windows.
A congregation of adorable baby gators piled atop each other in the sun along a swampy area, no doubt with an alert mother nearby.
“We remember those from last year,” said my seat neighbor Robert Montgomery, of nearby North Port. Montgomery said he brings all his visitors here; on that day, he hosted friends from Michigan.
“I love it here because this is as close to the original Florida as you can get, at least from my childhood,” Montgomery, 64, said. “I used to spend all my time in the woods.”
As we drove deeper into the ranch, Covert pointed out a bevy of birds, including sandhill cranes, egrets, anhingas, various herons and a red-shouldered hawk. More screams of delight erupted as a pack of feral pigs improbably ran toward the bus.
“Good morning, babies!” Covert hollered while tossing handfuls of corn feed out the open door, which explained their interest in us. Later, some “cracker cattle,” a historic breed, occasionally joined the noshing. (The ranch mostly raises Brahman, a popular beef cattle breed.)
At one point, we were let out to walk a short boardwalk over a swamp dotted with cypress trees and knees leading to an enclosure holding a Florida panther. Covert told us how a wild female panther and two kittens recently had been sighted on the ranch — a positive sign for the endangered species.
Back on the bus, we passed a swampy lake teeming with gators sliding across the surface and sunning on the shores, the largest group I’d seen outside of the Everglades.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also see gators at Babcock Ranch, the town, but a couple of hours later, walking around Sunset Lake near the main entrance, I spotted a few in the water. I also saw herons, egrets and sandhill cranes, though construction cranes and the beep beep beep of equipment backing up are just as noticeable for now. Ultimately, half the project’s 18,000 acres will be reserved for parks, wetlands and lakes.