St. Pete Beach on Florida's Gulf Coast combines a classic Florida beach town atmosphere with some of the Gulf's most beautiful sunset views. Wide, flat beaches with warm Gulf water that's reliably clearer than anything on Florida's Atlantic coast.
St. Pete Beach is a city on a barrier island in Pinellas County, facing the Gulf of Mexico. It sits just south of Clearwater Beach and shares the same Gulf Coast advantages — protected from Atlantic sargassum and facing west for spectacular sunsets.
Gulf Coast position means minimal sargassum exposure. The main natural water quality concern for Gulf beaches is red tide — check the Florida Fish & Wildlife red tide conditions map at myfwc.com before your visit. Most of the year, St. Pete Beach has excellent water quality.
The Pinellas Peninsula was one of the last areas in Florida to be settled by Europeans, its shallow coastal waters home to the Tocobaga people for thousands of years before contact. The first commercial airline flight in history landed in St. Petersburg in January 1914 — a paying passenger was carried across Tampa Bay in a flying boat, landing on the water's surface near the city's waterfront. The Don CeSar Hotel on St. Pete Beach — the grande dame 'Pink Palace' — opened in 1928 and hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald among its guests during Florida's Jazz Age boom, its towers still visible from the Gulf as a landmark sailors and pilots have used for nearly a century.
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