A shipwreck dumped 20,000 coconuts on Florida’s coast and built Palm Beach

Palm Beach’s wild origin story

A Spanish ship carrying 20,000 coconuts wrecked off this Florida coast in 1878, and the locals planted every last one. Within a decade, the island was thick with palms.

That’s how a barrier island 65 miles north of Miami got its name and its look.

Today, the four-square-mile town of Palm Beach sits on that same Atlantic coast, and the story only gets stranger from there.

The shipwreck that started it all

The island went by Palm City first, starting in 1880, then became Palm Beach in 1887.

It sits on an 18-mile-long barrier island, and nearly all of what makes it worth visiting traces back to those coconuts washing ashore. Local settlers planted them without any grand plan.

The palms grew, the island transformed, and word spread north.

What followed was one of the more unlikely resort origin stories in American history, driven not by nature alone but by one very ambitious man with a railroad.

Henry Flagler turned a jungle into a playground

Standard Oil tycoon Henry Flagler arrived in 1893 and decided the area was a paradise. He wasted no time.

His Royal Poinciana Hotel opened in February 1894, and he had a second hotel, The Breakers, up on the ocean beach by 1896.

That same year he pushed his Florida East Coast Railway south to the area, which meant wealthy Northerners could ride a train straight to the tropics.

He also built a working city across the lake for his employees, and that city became West Palm Beach.

Addison Mizner gave Palm Beach its look

In the 1920s, one architect reshaped the entire town.

Addison Mizner arrived in 1918 at the invitation of his friend Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine fortune, and his first project was the Everglades Club on Worth Avenue.

He drew from years of travel through Spain, Central America and Portugal, pulling in barrel tile roofs, stucco walls, arched cloisters, decorative ironwork and grand stairways.

He even opened his own factory, Mizner Industries, to produce custom tiles and pottery. By the time he was done, he’d designed 67 structures across Palm Beach.

Whitehall: a 75-room wedding gift

Flagler built Whitehall in 1902 as a wedding gift for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan.

The New York firm of Carrere and Hastings designed it in the Beaux-Arts style, and when it was finished, a newspaper declared it more remarkable than any palace in Europe. The numbers back that up: 75 rooms, 100,000 square feet.

Today it’s a National Historic Landmark open to the public as the Flagler Museum. On the grounds, you can walk through the Flagler Kenan Pavilion and stand next to Flagler’s personal railcar, No. 91.

What you’ll find inside the Flagler Museum

The museum opens Tuesday through Saturday at 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m., with Sunday hours running noon to 5 p.m. It’s closed Mondays and on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Self-guided tours take you through both floors of Whitehall, across the grounds, and into the railcar pavilion. Free audio guides are available through a smartphone app in several languages.

If you can plan around it, June 5 is Founder’s Day, and admission is free for everyone.

oThe hidden courtyards tucked off Worth Avenue

Worth Avenue got its name in 1913, honoring General William Jenkins Worth.

Walk the four-block stretch and you’ll pass arcaded shops, tiled fountains, sculptures and shaded benches under coconut palms. But the real draw is what you won’t see from the sidewalk.

Eight narrow pedestrian passageways called vias branch off the main avenue, each one opening into a courtyard filled with bougainvillea, mosaic staircases and tucked-away dining.

Via Mizner is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Most people walk right past the entrances without knowing they’re there.

A 5.5-mile waterfront trail with no cars in sight

The Lake Trail runs along the western edge of Palm Beach for 5.5 miles, tracing the Intracoastal Waterway from one end of the island to the other.

The paved path is traffic-free, and from it you’ll see mansions, yachts and the West Palm Beach skyline across the water.

Historical markers point out the oldest surviving home on the island and the site of the original church. The trail runs directly past the Flagler Museum, so you can combine both in a single morning.

Bike rentals are available near the Royal Poinciana Plaza, and the trail costs nothing.

Three beaches and some of the clearest water on the East Coast

Palm Beach sits where tropical ocean currents pass closer to shore than almost anywhere else in North America, and the water shows it.

Palm Beach Municipal Beach near Worth Avenue is the most central, with metered street parking nearby. Phipps Ocean Park has shade trees, a picnic area, tiki huts and a boardwalk walk down to the sand.

R.G. Kreusler Park runs quieter and smaller, good for swimming or picking through the shoreline for sea glass and shells. All three are free and open to the public.

A Gothic church in a Mediterranean town

The congregation at Bethesda-by-the-Sea dates to 1889, making it the oldest in Palm Beach.

Four members gathered on the shores of Lake Worth to start an Episcopal mission, and the current building, completed in the mid-1920s, grew from that small start.

The New York firm of Hiss and Weekes designed it in the Gothic Revival style, drawing from churches in Spain, Portugal and France. It stands apart from nearly everything around it.

Behind the building, the Cluett Memorial Garden is open to visitors and gives you a quiet corner of the island most people skip.

The island with a Cold War bunker beneath it

Peanut Island sits just 900 feet from the northern tip of Palm Beach, and you can only reach it by boat or water taxi. The 80-acre island was created in 1918 from material dredged out of the Lake Worth Inlet.

Today it’s a county park with snorkeling, kayaking, picnicking and camping. It also holds a 1936 Coast Guard station with deep ties to World War II.

In 1961, a secret fallout shelter was built here for President John F. Kennedy, whose family had an estate on Palm Beach. The Kennedy Bunker has been closed since 2017, with restoration plans still in discussion.

Gardens, sculptures and a mid-century plaza worth exploring

The Society of the Four Arts has operated on a 10-acre campus along the Intracoastal Waterway since 1936. Its Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden, open to the public since 1980, holds about 20 sculptures.

The botanical gardens, designed in 1938, include a Chinese garden, a jungle section and a moonlight garden planted entirely with white-blooming plants.

Both gardens are free and open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A short walk away, the Royal Poinciana Plaza, built in 1957 on the site of Flagler’s original hotel and carefully restored to its mid-century design in 2017, anchors the northern end of the island.

Getting to Palm Beach, Florida

Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach sits about 15 minutes away by car, and from there you cross one of the bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway onto the island.

If you’re coming from Miami, the drive is about 65 miles north on I-95, which takes roughly an hour and a half.

The town is small enough to cover on foot or by bike once you’re there, and with the Lake Trail, the vias, the free beaches and the museum all within a few miles of each other, you won’t need a car again until you leave.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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