Welcome to Hernando County

Hernando County sits on Florida's Nature Coast, about an hour north of Tampa, and it has managed something most of the Gulf coast gave up decades ago. There is no wall of condominium towers along the water. The coastline here is salt marsh and limestone and shallow flats, which is difficult to build on and wonderful to paddle through.

Roughly 200,000 people live here. Most of them are in Spring Hill, the large unincorporated community that spreads across the western half of the county. The county seat is Brooksville, a hill town with a courthouse square, which is a genuinely strange thing to say about Florida until you drive it and notice the elevation changing under you.

The water is the main event

Weeki Wachee Springs is the landmark everyone knows, and it earns it. The spring pushes out a large volume of clear fresh water at close to 74 degrees every day of the year, which is why the underwater theater there has been running mermaid shows since 1947 and why the river below it stays swimmable in January.

South and north of the spring, the coast turns into a maze of creeks and grass flats. Hernando Beach is a canal community with real working boats in it. Bayport, at the end of Cortez Boulevard, is a small county park where the road simply stops at the Gulf.

Inland is bigger than it looks

The Withlacoochee State Forest covers a substantial part of eastern Hernando and continues into neighboring counties. It is one of the largest state forests in Florida, and it is the reason you can be in a subdivision in twenty minutes and in longleaf pine for the rest of the afternoon.

The Suncoast Trail runs the length of the county alongside the Suncoast Parkway, paved and separated from traffic, and connects south into Pasco and Hillsborough.

What this site is for

We cover Hernando County: local news, the community calendar, a business directory, and a forum where neighbors talk to each other. If you run a business here, the ads on this site belong to people down the road from you rather than to a national ad network.

If something matters in your part of the county and we have missed it, tell us. That is the whole point of a community website.

Cover photo: DanTD / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Source.