Henderson Beach State Park
Near Destin, Florida
Amid the wall of high rise condominiums and resorts that lines this stretch of coast, there is a sudden green gap, a preserve of wild dunes rolling right down to the Gulf. This is Henderson Beach State Park, and it survives almost by accident of family land holding. The park is named for the Henderson family, its former owners, and the state of Florida purchased the land from the Henderson estate in nineteen eighty two.
It opened to the public on the twenty ninth of March in the year nineteen ninety one. Across its roughly two hundred and twenty acres you can see what all of Destin looked like before the towers rose, ancient dunes some of them over thirty feet high, held together by sea oats and scrub, backed by coastal pine forest. Long before any of that, this shore was home to Native American peoples, and later to Spanish and French visitors drawn, like everyone since, by the fishing.
Today the park protects nesting sea turtles and rare shorebirds along one of the last undeveloped ribbons of this famous white sand. In a town built on the idea of the beach, Henderson Beach preserves the actual thing, the raw coast that all the resorts were built to be near.
