Tampa's Most Iconic Landmarks

The long, low silhouette bristling with thirteen silver minarets on the west bank of the Hillsborough River is the former Tampa Bay Hotel, built by railroad and steamship magnate Henry B. Plant to lure wealthy travelers to the end of his line. Designed by John A.

Wood in an exuberant Moorish Revival style, the quarter-mile-long brick building was the most luxurious resort in Florida when it opened, the first structure in Tampa wired for electric light, and a statement that the sleepy port town had arrived.

Each of the onion-domed minarets is capped by a crescent moon, and the interiors were filled with European furnishings, mirrors, and art that Plant collected on his travels.

During the Spanish-American War in 1898 the hotel became a staging point for the invasion of Cuba, and Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders famously mustered on the grounds, giving the building a place in national as well as local history.

Since 1933 the building has housed the University of Tampa as Plant Hall, its corridors alive with students, while the original south wing is preserved as the Henry B. Plant Museum.

There you can walk through restored guest rooms and grand public spaces furnished as they were in the 1890s, and understand how a single ambitious hotel set the course for the modern city.

Ybor City, just northeast of downtown, is Tampa's most storied neighborhood, founded in 1885 when Spanish cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez-Ybor moved his operation here and built a company town around it.

Within a generation it had become the cigar capital of the world, its dozens of factories rolling hundreds of millions of hand-made cigars a year and drawing waves of Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and other immigrants who gave the district its enduring multicultural character.

The streets still tell that story in brick and iron: long two- and three-story cigar factories with their arched windows, rows of modest workers' cottages known as casitas, and the grand mutual-aid social clubs the immigrant communities built for themselves, ornate halls that provided health care, education, and entertainment.

Inside the factories, readers called lectores once sat above the workbenches reading news and novels aloud to the rollers, a tradition unique to the cigar trade.

Today Ybor is a National Historic Landmark District, its main artery, Seventh Avenue, or La Setima, lined with restored buildings, cafes, cigar shops, and nightlife.

Feral chickens roam the sidewalks as a protected neighborhood emblem, and the smell of coffee and tobacco still lingers. It is the birthplace of the Cuban sandwich and the beating cultural heart of the city.

The Florida Aquarium in the Channel District beside the port opened in 1995 and is instantly recognizable by its great shell-shaped glass dome.

Rather than a random assortment of tanks, its exhibits are organized to trace the path of water through Florida, beginning in a lush freshwater spring and wetland gallery and flowing outward through bays and beaches to the open Gulf and a spectacular coral reef.

The centerpiece is the Coral Reef gallery, a huge floor-to-ceiling window onto a re-created reef alive with sharks, sea turtles, goliath grouper, and shimmering schools of fish, where divers sometimes appear inside the glass to talk with visitors.

Other habitats hold playful North American river otters, a colony of African penguins, rays that guests can touch in an open lagoon, and a free-flight aviary threaded through the wetland walk.

Beyond entertainment, the aquarium is a serious center for conservation, running one of the region's leading sea turtle rescue programs and pioneering coral research aimed at restoring Florida's ailing reefs.

In warmer months its outdoor splash pad and a separate wild dolphin cruise from the adjacent dock extend the visit, making it one of the city's most family-friendly landmarks.

The Tampa Riverwalk is a continuous pedestrian and cycling path running roughly two and a half miles along the east bank of the Hillsborough River and the downtown waterfront, a decades-long civic project finally connected end to end in 2016.

What was once a fragmented, industrial, and largely inaccessible shoreline is now the spine of downtown life, linking one attraction to the next without ever leaving the water's edge.

Strolling its length ties together a remarkable string of landmarks: Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park with its lawns and playground, the Tampa Museum of Art and Glazer Children's Museum, the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, the Florida Aquarium, and the sports and concert crowds around Amalie Arena.

Bronze busts along the way form a Historical Monument Trail honoring figures from Tampa's past, and interpretive markers add context as you walk.

The Riverwalk is at its best as a way to experience the city at a human pace: manatees and dolphins sometimes surface in the river, water taxis and kayaks slide past, and the downtown skyline rises on one side while the University of Tampa's minarets glint across the water on the other.

Cafes, bars, and pocket parks give reasons to pause, making it as much a destination as a route.

Sacred Heart Catholic Church stands at the corner of Florida Avenue and Twiggs Street, a monumental Romanesque Revival sanctuary completed in 1905 that has anchored downtown Tampa through more than a century of change around it.

Built of white marble and gray granite by a congregation with Jesuit roots, its twin-towered facade and rose window rise with a solidity and grandeur that feel transported from an Old World European city.

The interior is the revelation: a lofty nave lined with columns, a richly detailed altar, and a spectacular program of stained-glass windows imported from Munich that flood the space with colored light.

A great dome and vaulted ceilings amplify the sense of height, and the craftsmanship throughout reflects the ambitions of a young, prosperous city determined to build something permanent and beautiful.

As glass towers have risen around it, Sacred Heart has become a striking counterpoint at street level, a reminder of the human scale and devotional artistry of an earlier Tampa.

It remains an active parish serving the downtown community, and its doors open onto sidewalks now shared with office workers and event crowds, a working church that doubles as one of the finest pieces of historic architecture in the city center.

Busch Gardens Tampa Bay opened in 1959 as a hospitality garden and bird sanctuary beside the old Anheuser-Busch brewery, and grew over decades into one of Florida's premier theme parks, an unusual hybrid of thrill rides and serious zoo.

Themed around Africa, its landscaped grounds are divided into regions evoking the continent, from the Serengeti and the Congo to Morocco and Egypt.

The park is best known today for its collection of record-setting roller coasters, among them the diving SheiKra, the launched Cheetah Hunt that races alongside the animal enclosures, and Iron Gwazi, a hybrid coaster that ranks among the tallest and fastest of its kind in North America.

Water rides, a towering drop tower, and gentler family attractions round out the mix.

What sets Busch Gardens apart is that it remains a fully accredited zoo caring for thousands of animals.

Its centerpiece is the Serengeti Plain, a sixty-plus-acre open savanna where giraffes, zebras, rhinos, and antelope roam and can be viewed from a train, a skyride, or a guided truck safari, while nearby habitats hold lions, elephants, gorillas, and tigers.

The pairing of genuine wildlife with adrenaline rides makes it a distinctive Tampa institution.