Find rich history along Florida’s Treasure Coast
Region offers roomy beaches and a thriving cultural scene with plenty to learn about
With more than 1,000 kilometres of hot, sandy beaches, Florida has a lot of coastline offering refuge from cold Canadian winters.
We’ve all heard about the Gold Coast, named for the glittery lifestyle you’ll find in the expensive playgrounds of Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Another famous strip of sand on the Atlantic side is the Space Coast, so named for the nearby Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The Treasure Coast, a 50-kilometre strip between the two, is becoming almost as well known as its neighbours. It runs from the tiny town of Sebastian in the north down to trendy Jensen Beach and historical Stuart in the south. The Treasure Coast doesn’t have the pounlding nightlife you’ll find in Miami, nor does it have beaches packed like a dance floor on Saturday night. There’s plenty of room for you, your towel and trashy novel. And when you’ve had enough sun for the day, you can soak up local arts and culture, take in a ball game and learn some interesting history.
For starters, there was the hurricane that wiped out a Spanish fleet in 1715 and dumped chests full of silver and gold into the sea. The fleet of 12 Spanish ships was on its way back to Europe with its annual haul of New World bounty when all but one of the wooden ships was wiped out in the storm. In 1928, the wreck of one of the ships was discovered off Fort Pierce (also known as the Sunrise City). In the early1960s, people started finding Spanish coins in the sand and shortly after, a couple of newspapermen with an eye for marketing started calling the area “the Treasure Coast” in print. It caught on. Counting coins You can read about the doomed 1715 Spanish fleet and see recovered coins, rings and other artifacts at the McLarty Treasure Museum in Vero Beach. Treasure hunting is a popular pastime in the area. Just ask museum guide Ed Perry. Using a metal detector, he found a Spanish reale on the beach and proudly wears the coin on a chain around his neck. Others have had bigger scores: In 2015, $4.5 million (U.S.) in gold coins was recovered in the waters off the Treasure Coast. Meet “Art” You could spend hours at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, wandering around the Alice and Jim Beckwith Sculpture Park outside and enjoying the five art galleries inside. The museum’s impressive collection includes a security guard sitting in the corner, a remarkably lifelike sculpture complete with name tag that reads “Art.” The 54,000-square-foot museum is the largest cultural arts facility of its kind on the Treasure Coast. It has a café, gift shop, regular speaker events and an art school with weekend workshops and classes. It also has free admission on the last Saturday of every month. Take me out to the ball game After you’ve had your fill of the arts, head to Port St. Lucie for a beer, a bratwurst and a ball game. Watch the sun go down and the lights come up in the beautiful Tradition Field while you cheer on the St. Lucie Mets, a minor-league team that plays in the Florida State League. The team is the high-A affiliate of the New York Mets. But you don’t have to care a whit about baseball to enjoy the family-friendly outing with 7,300 diehard local fans. And if you’re lucky you’ll get a selfie with Klutch, the big blue mascot that makes his way around the stands signing autographs at every game. Inside the Last Refuge While they’re not all as famous as the 1715 Spanish fleet, sailing ships used to go down pretty regularly just off the coast of Florida. Shipwrecks were so common that in1874 the U.S. government got busy building a series of “houses of refuge” up and down sparsely populated parts of the east coast. Survivors would often manage to make it to shore, but they needed immediate water, food and shelter.
Of the 10 sturdy houses built by 1885, only one remains: Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge near Stuart at the bottom of Hutchinson’s Island South. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it’s now a museum that shows how the keeper and his family lived in the small rooms on the main floor and kept the attic equipped with cots and enough dried and salted provisions to feed 20 people for 10 days.
Inside the little house, you can read about the JH Lane, which went down with $13,640 worth of molasses from Cuba in 1886, and the Georges Valentine, which sunk with a load of lumber on its way to Argentina in 1904 (its wreckage is now a popular dive site). Outside you may see a wedding happening on the pretty spit of sand where drenched sailors used to struggle to shore.