The Calusa fished, gathered shellfish, and built shell mounds along the Imperial River and Estero Bay coast for thousands of years before European contact; the great shell-mound capital at Mound Key, just north of Bonita in Estero Bay, still rises more than thirty feet above the water. The Spanish arrived in 1513 with Juan Ponce de León and made their first serious attempt to establish a foothold at Mound Key in 1567; the British took Florida in 1763 and gave it back in 1783; the United States annexed the territory in 1821; and Florida became the 27th state on March 3, 1845. U.S. Army surveyors first crossed the area during the Third Seminole War in the 1850s, and a second crew came through in the 1870s and pitched their long camp along what they called Surveyor's Creek — the camp that gave Survey its name, and the river the name it carried until 1912.
The 1936 Wonder Gardens era is the second chapter. Bill and Lester Piper opened their roadside attraction on Old 41 on February 22, 1936, as the Everglades Reptile Gardens; the name moved to the Everglades Wonder Gardens as the exhibits broadened, and the family ran it for three generations until 2013. The City of Bonita Springs bought the property in 2015 to keep it from commercial development, and a non-profit has operated it since on city-owned land. The Wonder Gardens — three and a half acres on Old 41 — is one of the oldest continuously operating roadside attractions in Florida, and the long banyan trees on the grounds are a Bonita signature. Hurricane Donna landed on Southwest Florida on September 10, 1960, and Hurricane Ian came ashore on September 28, 2022; the two storms are the defining storms of the modern Bonita era, and the city has rebuilt after both. Lovers Key, the four-barrier-island chain just north of Bonita Beach, was preserved as a Florida state park in 1983 after being saved from luxury condominium development. Barefoot Beach Preserve, just south of the city line in Collier County, runs two miles of natural Gulf shoreline north of Wiggins Pass under the Saylor Trail boardwalk. The City of Bonita Springs received the Preserve America Community designation in 2012.
Why People Visit Bonita Springs Florida
Bonita Springs offers the Imperial River corridor through downtown, the 1926 Liles Hotel and 1936 Wonder Gardens on Old 41, the public Gulf shoreline of Bonita Beach Park, the four-island Lovers Key State Park preserved by Florida in 1983, the Collier County dunes of Barefoot Beach Preserve north of Wiggins Pass, the Calusa shell-mound capital at Mound Key in Estero Bay, and the Tamiami Trail roadside-Florida lineage that runs from Tampa through Bonita to Miami. It is a Southwest Florida coastal river city built by U.S. Army surveyors, rebranded by Tennessee investors in 1912, and rebuilt twice in the modern era after Donna and Ian. On the Paradise Coast since 1912.
