Weeki Wachee Springs

Weeki Wachee is a state park built around a spring, and its attraction is mermaids. Women in fish tails perform underwater in the spring of the Weeki Wachee River, watched through windows below the surface, and they have been doing it since 1947.

The name is Seminole and means little spring, or winding river.

The show was the idea of Newt Perry, a stunt swimmer and attraction promoter, who built it around underwater air hose breathing. The whole show is built on breathing from an air hose rather than from anything the performer carries, which is what lets them move the way they do. Perry started with an 18-seat theatre, later replaced by one holding 50, embedded directly into the lime rock of the spring with viewing windows below the waterline.

It was famous enough to host a film premiere. The Incredible Mr Limpet, a Warner Bros live-action and animated comedy, opened at the Weeki Wachee Springs Underwater Theater on 20 January 1964, in what was the world's first underwater premiere.

The site is more than the show now. Buccaneer Bay is a waterpark on the same property, and there are river boat rides and kayak and paddleboard rental on the spring run.

The spring itself is the reason any of it exists: clear, constant-temperature water rising out of the Floridan Aquifer, which is what makes underwater performance possible in the first place.

Buccaneer Bay opened in 1982 with water slides, a lazy river and a white sand beach. The guest list over the years runs from Elvis Presley and Esther Williams to Don Knotts, Arthur Godfrey, Kevin Smith and Larry the Cable Guy, and Hollywood has borrowed the mermaids for Mr Peabody and the Mermaid in 1948, Neptune’s Daughter in 1949 and Sunshine State in 2002, along with television from Route 66 in 1963 onward. The English band Supergrass filmed the video for Low C here in 2005.

It was owned at one point by the broadcast network ABC, which did its publicity no harm. It now belongs to the State of Florida, is operated by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection as part of the state park system, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.