Topsail Hill Preserve State Park

Topsail Hill Preserve State Park is a Florida state park of about 1,637 acres (662 ha) on the Gulf of Mexico in Walton County, northwestern Florida. The park lies in Santa Rosa Beach about 10 miles (16 km) east of Destin, with entrances off U.S. 98 and Scenic Highway 30A. It is named for a prominent white-sand dune whose profile, viewed from the Gulf, was said to resemble a ship's topsail. The park preserves about 3.2 miles (5.1 km) of undeveloped shoreline, parts of five coastal dune lakes, and roughly a dozen Florida Natural Areas Inventory natural communities that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) describes as one of the most intact coastal ecosystems in the state. Its dune scrub supports the largest surviving natural population of the federally endangered Choctawhatchee beach mouse (Peromyscus polionotus allophrys), and Topsail Hill has served as the donor site for every reintroduction of the subspecies to other Panhandle state parks since the late 1980s. The park was assembled in 1992 from lands originally targeted for large-scale coastal development, and in 2024 it drew national attention as one of the parks named in a subsequently withdrawn FDEP proposal to build a 350-room lodge on state-park land.

Park data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).