Our Panama City Beach logo carries the Florida alligator over “Florida Territory · Est. 1845,” the year Florida became a state — the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida town. Printed in clean retro black-and-white that reads like an old crate label, the alligator stands for Florida as a whole; what makes this one Panama City Beach is everything behind it — the neon Miracle Strip and the Starliner’s wooden hills, Goofy Golf’s concrete dinosaurs, and the quartz-white sand and emerald water of the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches.
The Strip’s other landmark is older and stranger. In the late 1950s a welder-artist named Lee Koplin began pouring concrete dinosaurs, a sphinx, and a giant grinning gorilla beside a miniature-golf course, and Goofy Golf was born — Day-Glo roadside folk art that a Washington Post writer once said “ought to be placed on the national historic register.” It still stands. Around it grew the whole vocabulary of the old beach: motels with neon signs, sno-cone stands, a fake volcano, live sharks in tanks at the surf shops. This is the Florida of cheap, happy, slightly tacky fun, and Panama City Beach kept more of it than almost anywhere.
Why People Visit Panama City Beach
Panama City Beach rewards visitors who want bright white sand, warm emerald water, and an unpretentious good time, with a thread of retro neon still running through it. Add the piers, Shell Island, and the year-round Gulf sun, and the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches make their own case.
