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.
People had lived around the bay for thousands of years before any of that. The Tocobaga fished and built shell mounds along these shores, and Spanish expeditions — Narvaez in 1528, Hernando de Soto near the bay in 1539 — passed through with consequences that fell hard on Native nations. Permanent settlement came with the U.S. Army: Fort Brooke was planted at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824, a frontier post that anchored the village that incorporated as Tampa in 1855.
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.
