The Island Hotel and Restaurant

Just read any Carl Hiaasen novel, and you’ll learn all about Florida’s curious relationship with its own history. Whether it’s a charming Spanish-colonial mansion or a peaceful marshland that serves as a rookery for shore birds, a developer is bound to come along and “improve it” with some combination of a wrecking ball, concrete, steel and perhaps an award-winning golf course design. Sure, there’s South Beach, but many of its deco masterpieces nearly got razed before the urbane taste makers intervened.

But Florida has a history that goes back further than the twentieth century, and through a combination of luck, tenacity and storm-proof construction The Island Hotel and Restaurant, which was build around 1860, has been preserved as a prime example early Florida architecture. Although the two-story hotel was built by Americans, the wrap around balconies and porches definitely give it a euro-colonial flavor. Solidly built from seashell tabby and limestone, the hotel has survived the onslaught of developers, abandonment by its owners and innumerable floods, hurricanes and other storms. The ten guest rooms are cozy and romantic, with original wood floors and detailing. Some rooms even have claw-foot tubs. Since it is an old building, the floors creak and slope, but that just adds to the charm.

The hotel has a bar, which is the only bar in the county that doesn’t have a television, and a restaurant that serves gourmet food.

There are also plenty of ghost stories. Some of the spirits that haunt the hotel include a nine year old slave boy who died before the end of the Civil War, a Confederate private who guards the second floor, a prostitute and some poor soul who was poisoned by the hotel manager. FYI: That manager has long since departed the hotel and this world.