Honeymoon Island State Park is a Florida state park protecting most of Honeymoon Island, a barrier island on Florida's Gulf coast in Pinellas County, west of Dunedin. The park protects approximately of shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico together with extensive seagrass beds, mangrove swamps, slash pine flatwoods, and coastal dunes and grasslands. It was acquired by the state in 1974 and formally opened on December 7, 1981.
The island is south of the Anclote Keys and north of Caladesi Island, being separated by a hurricane in 1921. The two islands originally formed a single island named Hog Island, with the inlet between them being known as Hurricane Pass. The park's landform includes a wind and wave shaped finger at its northern end that has grown outward by more than per year since the late 1970s.
Honeymoon Island supports a healthy gopher tortoise population, one of Florida's most concentrated osprey nesting colonies, and nesting loggerhead sea turtles. It is a wintering and stopover site of state and federal importance for migratory shorebirds, such as piping plover and red knot, and has been ranked among Florida's top sites for wintering shorebirds.
More than 1.5 million visitors were recorded in fiscal year 2022–23, making Honeymoon Island the most-visited traditional state park in Florida.
History Sand Island and Hog Island "Sand Island" was first identified in the 1830s on United States coastal maps. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the island had been renamed Hog Island for a farm on the property, and this name stayed in use for nearly a century. On October 25, 1921, a major hurricane cut a new inlet through the barrier, dividing Hog Island into two landmasses; the northern half became Honeymoon Island and the southern half became Caladesi Island.
Honeymoon Village In 1939 the New York advertising executive Clinton M. Washburn purchased the northern half of the former Hog Island for $25,000 and, aided by a friendship with a Life magazine editor, launched a national publicity campaign to reimagine the site as a honeymoon retreat. Washburn built roughly 50 palm-thatched cottages in a Polynesian style, together with a "king's palace" pavilion, a wedding chapel, a dance hall, a water tower, and a communal building. The resort opened to the public on March 8, 1940, when its first guests, Marjorie and Earnest Burkett, arrived.
The complex was promoted through a Life magazine feature on April 8, 1940, and a Paramount newsreel the same year, drawing more than 200 couples to a contest whose winners were awarded a two-week stay in the huts, with rowboat, gas stove, and no electricity or plumbing supplied. Notable applicants reportedly included the actors Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. A total of 164 couples were accommodated before the United States entered World War II in December 1941.
Following the war, Washburn would lease the property to an Ohio defense contractor as a rest facility for war-industry workers, and the island was also used for amphibious vehicle testing. None of the resort structures survived the war; a concrete pad and two upright elements near the Osprey Center are the only visible remains that might date from the period.
Postwar and 1960s development
The industrialist Arthur Vining Davis acquired the island in 1956, and in 1958 title passed to Robert E. Lee on behalf of Curlew Properties, Inc. The Dunedin Causeway, connecting the mainland to the barrier, was completed in December 1964 to support a proposed development that would have enlarged the island from about to of dredged fill and constructed 4,500 residential units to house 16,000 people. Preparation involved a 1969 dredge-and-fill operation on the southwestern beach that was halted mid-way in the face of opposition from local conservation groups. The dredging permit expired in late 1969, and the Army Corps of Engineers and state agencies declined to renew it.
An eight-building, 449-unit residential complex known as Royal Stewart Arms was completed on at the eastern end of the island in 1973 and remains the only non-park development on Honeymoon Island.
State park Beginning on December 13, 1974, the Florida Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund purchased the remaining undeveloped land from Hyman and Fay Green in six successive tracts totaling more than between 1974 and 1980. This was accomplished using the Land Acquisition Trust Fund and Land and Water Conservation Fund as well as small donations from the city of Dunedin and Pinellas County in 1982 and 1983 respectively. The Trustees leased the property to the Florida Division of Recreation and Parks on December 7, 1981, for a fifty-year term, and the park opened to the public later that month.
The Rotary Centennial Nature Center, an interpretive facility built with support from local Rotary clubs and volunteers, was dedicated in May 2007. A ferry to Caladesi Island State Park operates from a dock on the island's southeast shore, and a paved multi-use trail extending from the Fred Marquis Pinellas Trail system enters the park by way of the causeway.
Tropical storms and hurricanes
Beyond the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane that created the island in its modern form, Honeymoon Island has been reshaped by several later tropical cyclones. Hurricane Elena stalled off western Florida in September 1985, driving severe beach erosion and cutting a small overwash pass across the northern end of neighboring Caladesi Island; sediment mobilized by Elena and the subsequent Hurricane Juan partly refilled Dunedin Pass at Caladesi's southern end, which closed completely by 1988.
Hurricane Idalia passed to the north on August 30, 2023, generating storm surge that stripped sand from the beach parking lots and eroded roughly of dune elsewhere on Pinellas County beaches. Hurricane Helene struck on September 26, 2024, closing the park indefinitely for damage assessment. Hurricane Milton followed on October 9, 2024, cutting several new passes across the barrier and inflicting what park-support groups described as the worst damage since the 1921 storm. The Florida Park Service contracted Gator Dredging of Clearwater to move about 168,000 cubic yards of sand from Hurricane Pass to rebuild the beaches and dunes, and volunteers planted more than 30,000 sea oats to stabilize the new dune surface by March 2025. The park partially reopened by late November 2024, with the north beach remaining closed into 2026.
Archaeology Honeymoon Island lies within the traditional territory of the Tocobaga, a group from the Safety Harbor culture that inhabited the shores of Tampa Bay and its estuaries from approximately AD 900 until coming into contact with the Spanish. Archaeological evidence of prehistoric occupation on Honeymoon Island itself is scarce. The Florida Master Site File, the state's inventory of cultural resources, records only two sites within the park. Both are recorded under the Smithsonian trinomial system, in which 8 is the state code for Florida and "Pi" abbreviates Pinellas County. The first site is 8Pi747 (Osprey Breeding site), a scatter of stone flakes and tool fragments first mapped in 1982, and the second is 8Pi11664 (Sand Spit site), a sand mound containing shell middens near the Osprey Trail. At the Sand Spit site, artifacts including two projectile points and a stone scraper have been recovered and are on display at the park's nature center. On the nearby island of Caladesi, Clarence B. Moore documented the Hog Island Mound (8Pi9) in 1903 as a burial mound containing skeletal remains of unspecified cultural affiliation.
Pottery shards and fragments of 16th-century European chain mail have been reported from the island, suggesting that the Spanish used the barrier as a stopover during the early colonial period, though no formal excavation or scholarly analysis of the finds has been published. An archaeological sensitivity model developed for the park in 2013 by the University of South Florida's Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies identified the Osprey Breeding site as an area with a high probability of containing additional cultural resources. Both recorded sites are assessed as being in poor condition owing to past land alteration and continuing sea-level rise.
Geology and climate Honeymoon Island lies in the coastal lagoon and barrier-island chain sub-zone of Florida's coastal lowlands, between St. Joseph Sound on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west. Elevations range from mean sea level to about on artificial berms; the highest natural features are the primary dune line along the Gulf shore. The underlying bedrock belongs to the lower Miocene Hawthorn Formation, an interbedded sequence of sand, clay, marl, limestone, fuller's earth, and phosphate nodules; the limestone platform is capped by a few feet of Pleistocene and Holocene sand and mud.
Radiocarbon-calibrated sea-level curves place the modern island at 4,800 to 7,000 years old. Following its formation, shoreline accretion enlarged the barrier during a period of slowing sea-level rise; an acceleration about 4,000 years ago drove shoreline retreat, and a further slowdown around 3,000 years ago began a second phase of growth that continues today.
Formation of Hurricane Pass Honeymoon and Caladesi Islands were a single landmass, Hog Island, until the October 1921 hurricane cut Hurricane Pass through the barrier and permanently separated them. The storm produced tides roughly above normal. Regional geologist Richard A. Davis Jr. has described the same event as "probably the most devastating in recorded history as far as the Pinellas County coast is concerned"; it also opened Redfish Pass at Captiva Island and reshaped inlets from Anclote Key south to Sanibel.
Barrier-island dynamics Since 1921 the island has undergone rapid morphological change under the low-energy, mixed-wave-and-tide regime of the west-central Florida coast, where mean wave height at the shore is less than . The southern half of the island was drastically altered in 1969, when about of fill were dredged from offshore and placed on the southwestern beach in preparation for a residential development that was never built. The fill included limestone pebbles and rocks as well as quartz sand. Longshore drift subsequently removed much of the sand, exposing a hardened shoreline of limestone rubble that has continued to complicate beach recreation and shorebird nesting.
Nearshore shoals along the northern half of the island coalesced with the shore as an exposed sand spit in the late 1970s. That spit now forms a curving, finger of beach, dune, coastal strand, and mangrove at the island's northern tip and has continued to lengthen at more than per year.
Climate Honeymoon Island has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa), moderated annually by its position on the Gulf of Mexico. Summers are hot and humid, with mean daily highs in the warmest months reaching about and frequent afternoon convective storms; winters are mild and drier, with January mean highs near and only occasional freezes. Rainfall averages about per year at Dunedin, with roughly two-thirds falling between June and September during the Atlantic hurricane season; that season also brings the island's principal geological hazard, tropical cyclones making landfall or passing near the Pinellas coast.
Ecology The park is classified as a state recreation area by the Florida Park Service and all its surface waters are designated Outstanding Florida Waters. The park lies within the Pinellas County Aquatic Preserve established under the Florida Aquatic Preserve Act of 1975.
Natural communities