Gainesville’s Broken Arrow Bluff

On the Road 1 Minute

You might never find Broken Arrow Bluff Park in Gainesville if you don’t know exactly where it is.

The park sits behind a nondescript fence at the end of a nondescript cul de sac on the edge of a nondescript neighborhood of small homes. It is hidden just northwest of Archer Road and I-75.

But it is a Florida treasure. The low bluff here looks out over Lake Kanapaha and the lush tropical jungle scene that this sinkhole-prone area embraces.

One of its most incredible features is the large limestone outcropping that juts into the air from the shores of the green lake — a sure sign of the underlying karst geology so conducive to sinkholes and natural springs. The park could easily be the set of an old Tarzan movie.

Lake Kanapaha itself taps into the aquifer below and meanders north along the the edge of the adjoining Kanapaha Botanical Gardens. Both the park and the gardens are worthy of visits whenever anyone has time to play tourist here in this home of the University of Florida.

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Published by Robert Craig Waters

Robert Craig Waters is a Florida writer. After leaving journalism in the early 1980s, he worked as an attorney, communications director, and public spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee for 35 years. He grew up on a family farm in Beulah, Florida, not far from the Alabama border, before attending Brown University in the 1970s. His mother's family traces its roots to Weaverville, North Carolina. His father's family is from the small village of Burnt Corn, Alabama, where Mr. Waters spent part of his childhood.

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