What’s with the Miracle Strip? For half a century the stretch of beach road through Panama City Beach was the Miracle Strip — a glorious tangle of neon, putt-putt, surf shops, and old-Florida kitsch, anchored by an amusement park. The Miracle Strip Amusement Park opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1963 around the Starliner, a wooden out-and-back roller coaster that was the first ever built in Florida. For forty years the Starliner’s white wooden hills were the skyline of the beach; in 1980 someone rode it for 336 straight hours and set a world record. The park closed in 2004 and the coaster was hauled away, but the name still means something here: the Miracle Strip is shorthand for old, neon, unpretentious Florida fun.
The town that holds all this came together piece by piece. A resort “Grand Opening” in 1936 put the beach on the map; over the next decades a string of separate beach communities — Long Beach, Edgewater, Gulf Beach and more — grew along the shore, incorporated in 1953, and finally merged into a single City of Panama City Beach in 1970. Before the resorts there were fishing hamlets, turpentine camps, and, during World War II, a shipyard and a gunnery range on St. Andrews Bay.
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.
