Bookable
An Apollonaut travel guide
The place behind the detail.
A roadside stop, a family business and thousands of alligators offer several ways into the story of Gatorland.
On this page
A roadside attraction
Owen Godwin opened Gatorland in 1949 on former cattle land beside Orange Blossom Trail. With his wife Pearl, he wanted to show passers-by Florida’s reptiles at close quarters.
It began as a gift shop in a stockade-style building with a sawdust floor. More than seventy years later, the park is still privately owned by the Godwin family.
A park and wildlife preserve
Today Gatorland covers 110 acres and calls itself the Alligator Capital of the World. More than 2,000 American alligators live there, along with crocodiles, birds, snakes and other animals.
Its breeding marsh, crossed by a boardwalk and overlooked by an observation tower, appeared in the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The alligator’s mouth
Visitors still enter through the mouth of a concrete alligator. When a fire destroyed the gift shop in 2006, the historic mouth was repainted and built into the new entrance building, which opened in 2008.
This history belongs to the place and the people who shaped it. The History page offers a longer introduction, and the timeline gives a short route through selected milestones.
Read at the source
Sources & further reading
Links lead to the original publishers.
