The name came long before the architect. Spanish charts called the inlet here Boca de Ratones — often mistranslated as 'rat's mouth,' but really a sailor's term for an inlet studded with hidden rocks that frayed anchor ropes. Long before that, the Glades culture, ancestors and kin of the Tequesta, lived along this coast and the Intracoastal lagoon for thousands of years. Through the Spanish and British colonial eras and into Florida statehood in 1845, the place stayed wild and thinly settled — a stretch of subtropical coast waiting for a town.
The dream lasted barely a year. In September 1926 the Great Miami Hurricane tore through South Florida and the land boom collapsed behind it; the Mizner Development Corporation went bankrupt in 1927, and Addison Mizner died, his fortune gone, in 1933. But the architecture outlived the money. The Cloister Inn passed through new owners to become the Boca Raton Club, then the Boca Raton Resort & Club, and finally The Boca Raton, the pink tower of its 1969 addition still presiding over the water. Around it survive the Mediterranean Revival bones Mizner laid down — the bungalows of Old Floresta, the courtyard of The Addison, and the old Town Hall, now the city's history museum.
Why People Visit Boca Raton
Boca Raton rewards visitors who want South Florida with a century of style behind it — Addison Mizner's Mediterranean Revival architecture, a beautiful stretch of Atlantic beach, the arts and dining of Mizner Park, and a genuinely surprising history that runs from a secret WWII radar school to the birthplace of the personal computer. People come for the beaches and the resort glamour, for the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and for an easy, refined coastal day with deep roots.
