Boca Raton's modern story is stranger and more inventive than its resort glamour suggests. From 1942 to 1945 the Boca Raton Army Air Field was a top-secret base — the Army Air Corps' sole radar training school, where thousands of airmen learned the new science, and a training ground for B-29 crews. Part of the field had risen on the farmland of the Yamato Colony, the Japanese settlement founded around 1904 whose families lost their land to wartime eminent domain — Yamato Road still carries the name. After the war the airfield's land became Florida Atlantic University — authorized in 1961, opened in 1964 — whose campus still traces the old runway lines. And on August 12, 1981, in an IBM facility in Boca Raton, a small team unveiled the IBM Personal Computer — the machine that launched the modern PC era. For a city built on a Mediterranean fantasy, Boca turned out to be a quietly serious place.
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.
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.
