What’s with the Clear Water? Clearwater was named for water. Really. On a salty coast, fresh water is the whole game — and along the bluff above the harbor, clear freshwater springs flowed straight out of the ground and down to the bay. The Tocobaga people drank from them for centuries before a European ever saw the place; the American settlers who came later named their landing “Clear Water Harbor” for the same springs. Add three miles of sugar-white barrier-island sand and one of the sunniest coasts in America, and the name turned out to be the whole brand: clear water, bright sky, and a beach that keeps landing at the top of the national rankings.
The land boom of the 1920s built and busted, the beach kept rising — and then two things happened in 1947: big-league baseball made Clearwater its spring home, beginning one of the longest team-and-town spring training partnerships in the game (the Phillies have trained here ever since), and a local boatbuilder named Clark Mills launched a plywood sailboat for the neighborhood kids on August 14 — the Optimist pram, which went on to become the most popular children’s sailboat on earth. Pier 60 — the current pier went up in 1962 — made the sunset itself a nightly civic event, and through every storm the Gulf has thrown at it, the town has rebuilt and reopened the umbrellas.
Why People Visit Clearwater Florida
- Spend a day on Clearwater Beach, the three-mile white-sand barrier-island beach repeatedly ranked among the top beaches in America — calm, shallow Gulf water, long flat sand, sunsets straight across the Gulf horizon.
- Walk out on Pier 60, the 1962 fishing-and-sunset pier on Clearwater Beach where the daily sunset celebration has been a Clearwater tradition for decades — artisans, musicians, and the green-flash crowd every clear evening.
- Drive or walk the Clearwater Memorial Causeway (FL-60) — the 1915-16 bridge alignment that first connected the mainland to the barrier-island beach, now the high-arc causeway with the harbor on both sides.
- Visit the Clearwater Marine Aquarium on the Clearwater Memorial Causeway — a marine-mammal rehabilitation and rescue center caring for dolphins, sea turtles, otters, and stranded marine wildlife from the Gulf coast.
- Watch a Major League Baseball spring training game in February or March at the Phillies' Clearwater spring-training camp — one of the longest team-city affiliations in the major leagues, going on since 1947.
- Drive south to Sand Key, the lower barrier island just past Clearwater Beach, for the wider stretches of sand at Sand Key Park and the quieter end of the barrier-island chain.
- Walk the downtown Clearwater waterfront at Coachman Park along Clearwater Harbor — the redeveloped 2023 waterfront park with The Sound amphitheater, walking paths, and harbor views across to the beach.
- Stroll Cleveland Street, the downtown corridor on the bluff above the harbor with public art and the historic streetscape.
- Drive twenty minutes east to Heritage Village in Largo, the 21-acre Pinellas County living history museum with 33 historic structures dating from the 1840s — log cabins, the oldest house in Pinellas County, a country store, a train station, a sponge warehouse, and the McKay Creek Boat Shop.
- Visit the McKay Creek Boat Shop exhibit at Heritage Village for the Clark Mills Optimist Pram story — the 1947 design that has carried 400,000 children onto the water in 120 countries, with original Mills-built Optimist Prams, his Snipe sailboat Honey, the Sun Cat, and the Windmill on display.
- Look for the historic Belleview Inn (the surviving preserved portion of the 1897 Henry B. Plant Belleview Biltmore Hotel, demolished 2015) — the last fragment of one of Florida's great Gilded Age resort hotels.
- Catch sunset from Pier 60 or anywhere on the west-facing Gulf side of the barrier island — the longest unbroken horizon line on the central Florida Gulf Coast, on one of the sunniest shorelines in America.
