Look at the walls on the tour. The marks in them were made by hand.
Florida Caverns near Marianna is the only state park in Florida with air-filled caves the public can walk into, and the reason you can walk upright through them is that Civilian Conservation Corps crews spent the 1930s enlarging the passages with chisels. Their tool marks are still visible between the large underground rooms. The same crews built the park's visitor centre and the neighbouring golf course, all of it New Deal work, and the park opened in 1942.
What they opened up is limestone: stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone and draperies, shaped by water working at bedrock. Tours now run under a new LED lighting system.
The park is a protected pocket of karst topography and the ecosystem matches it, with plants adapted to limestone substrate and blind crayfish, bats and salamanders in the caves and waterways. Native Americans lived in this area, so it is an archaeological site as much as a geological one.
The practical shape of a visit: the park is open 8 a.m. to sunset, every day of the year. Cave tours run seven days a week between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Central, and guides take out as many as thirty groups in a day. Tickets are first come, first served from the gift shop on the day of arrival, they sell out on weekends and holidays, and only a limited number can be booked online. Entry is 5 dollars per vehicle. The cave tour is 16 dollars for ages 13 and up, 9 dollars for ages 3 to 12, and free for children 2 and under.
The cave closes for maintenance on scattered dates through the year, so check the schedule before you drive out.
Above ground there is camping, hiking, paddling, boating, fishing and horseback riding, plus rivers and springs of its own.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
