Tampa learned early how to throw a party and chase the future at once. The first Gasparilla festival sailed into the bay in 1904, a civic carnival built around the legend of the pirate Jose Gaspar that still fills the streets every January. A decade later, on the first day of 1914, the aviator Tony Jannus flew the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa — the beginning of an entire industry, launched over Tampa's water.
While the tabaqueros worked, a railroad baron built a fantasy across the river. Henry B. Plant ran his rail line into Tampa and in 1891 opened the Tampa Bay Hotel, a quarter-mile of Moorish Revival brick crowned with silver minarets and onion domes — the most extravagant building in Florida. Plant's railroad and steamships tied Tampa to the world and helped make it a real port; in 1898 the hotel and the city served as a staging point for U.S. troops bound for Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The hotel survives today as the University of Tampa and the Henry B. Plant Museum, its minarets still the city's signature skyline against the bay.
Why People Visit Tampa
Tampa draws travelers who want real heritage with Gulf sunshine — the brick-and-cigar history of Ybor's Latin Quarter, the fairy-tale minarets of Plant's hotel, the bay and the Riverwalk, and a pirate festival unlike anywhere else. It is a city that wears its immigrant, working-waterfront story openly, an easy gateway to the Gulf beaches just across the bay.
