Sarasota

Native peoples lived around Sarasota Bay for thousands of years, leaving shell mounds such as those at Spanish Point to the south. American settlement came late: a Scottish colony organised by the Florida Mortgage and Investment Company of Edinburgh began arriving in December 1885. John Hamilton Gillespie, a Scot who settled here, laid out the first golf holes in Florida in 1886 and became the first mayor when the town was incorporated in 1902.

Bertha Palmer, the widow of the Chicago businessman Potter Palmer, bought over 80,000 acres in and around Sarasota in 1910, bringing cattle ranching, citrus and the attention of wealthy northerners. The 1920s land boom transformed Sarasota: John Ringling bought and developed St. Armands and Lido keys, built the causeway to them in 1926, and John built Ca' d'Zan and the art museum for his collection of Baroque painting. In 1927 he moved the winter quarters of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus here, making the town the circus capital of the country.

The boom collapsed and the Depression followed; Ringling left his estate to the people of Florida at his death in 1936. After the Second World War the city grew as a retirement and tourist destination, and the modernist architects of the Sarasota School built houses and schools here. The circus later moved its winter base to Venice. Since then the arts, the beaches and steady migration from the north have driven growth, and in October 2024 Hurricane Milton, less than two weeks after Helene, came ashore near Siesta Key with a major storm surge.

Sarasota calls itself Florida's cultural coast, and for a city of its size the claim holds. It has a resident opera company in a restored 1920s house, a professional repertory theatre, a ballet, an orchestra, a film festival and a circus arts school, and the Ringling estate holds the art museum John Ringling left to the state. Ringling College of Art and Design, founded in 1931, is a school of visual arts and design, and the architecture of the Sarasota School — Paul Rudolph and his colleagues of the 1940s and 1950s — draws design pilgrims.

The circus never quite left. The Sailor Circus, a youth circus founded as a high-school programme in 1949, still performs; retired performers settled in the city; and the names of the Ringlings are on the causeway, the college and the museum. The street painters of the chalk festival, which began in the city, are part of the same taste for spectacle.

Daily culture is shaped by the winter season. In winter the population swells with seasonal residents and visitors, the restaurants fill, and the arts calendar is at its fullest; summer is slower and more local. The city is older than the state average, and manners are courteous and unhurried. Beach life sets the tone the rest of the time: sunsets on Siesta Beach, with a drum circle on Sunday evenings, are a civic ritual.

About 55,000 people live inside the city limits and about 434,000 in Sarasota County, which stretches south to Venice and North Port; the two-county metropolitan area shared with Bradenton holds about 935,000. The city is older than most — the median age is about 50 — and retirees, winter residents and the people who serve them shape the economy. Health care, led by Sarasota Memorial Hospital, tourism, construction, real estate, financial services and the arts are the main sources of work.

Residents live in distinct worlds. The keys and the bayfront condominium towers are wealthy and seasonal; the older neighbourhoods east of downtown, Newtown — historically the city's African American community — and the subdivisions along the interstate are where most year-round workers live, and the cost of housing has risen out of reach for many of them. Traffic on US 41 and the causeways, the price of homes and insurance, and the pace of building on the keys are the constant complaints.

The day starts early, with walkers and cyclists on the bayfront and the Legacy Trail before the heat. Afternoons in summer are for air conditioning and the thunderstorms that arrive on schedule; evenings in season are for the theatres and the restaurants of Main Street and St. Armands. Hurricane season brings shutters, sandbags and evacuation planning each year, and the floods of 2024 left many households on the keys rebuilding.

Gulf seafood anchors the menus. The grouper sandwich — fresh grouper fried, grilled or blackened in a bun — is the lunch of the coast, with stone crab claws in season, Gulf shrimp, mullet, snapper and smoked fish dip, a spread of smoked mullet or mahi-mahi eaten with crackers and hot sauce. Fish houses on the bayfront, at the marinas and on the keys serve them with sunset views, and the raw bars shuck Gulf oysters.

Florida's Spanish and Cuban cooking reached Sarasota through the Columbia Restaurant, the Tampa institution whose St. Armands Circle branch has served Spanish and Cuban dishes since 1959. The rest of the table is cosmopolitan and shaped by the winter visitors: Italian, French, Mediterranean and Asian restaurants along Main Street and Palm Avenue, steakhouses for the season, and casual beach kitchens, tiki bars and ice cream shops in Siesta Village and around St. Armands.

Florida citrus and local produce appear on menus across the city, and the Amish and Mennonite community of Pinecraft, a Sarasota neighbourhood, has its own restaurants, among them Der Dutchman.