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.
Through all of it, Boca Raton became a magnet for the Northeast. Families from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and beyond moved south or wintered here, until the city's character became as much transplanted-Northeast as native-Florida — a connection that ties Boca, in its own way, back to our New England roots. Today it's an affluent coast of beaches, golf, the arts at Mizner Park, and a hundred years of Mediterranean Revival style, with the Cloister Inn marking its centenary in 2026.
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.
