St Lucie County:  Port St Lucie.

Founded in 1961 as a planned community, Port St Lucie (pop 90,600+) is a new community compared to an old Florida town like Fort Pierce.   Its mushrooming growth, however, has already made it one of the larger towns in the state, and community leaders predict a population of 275,000 residents before it has reached its planned maximum size,  Port St Lucie is one of the communities with enough vision to see the wisdom of locating away from the crowded coast.  In terms of land mass, Port St Lucie's 85 square miles make it the third largest city in Florida.  It also seems to be one of the best managed.  The original design - that of individual residential communities with their own schools, parks and shopping centers - is still being followed today. 

There are 22 miles of beaches with twenty beach parks for swimming and sunning.  On South Hutchinson Island the beach has a boardwalk, picnic tables, lifeguards, and dressing areas with showers.  The coasts of St Lucie County and her neighboring counties have spectacular reefs and wrecked ships for scuba diving.  There are seventeen public and nine private golf courses in the area (more are being build as we write this article).  Three of them are PGA courses rated in the top twenty by Golf Digest.

The New York Mets hold spring training in Port St Lucie.  St Lucie County is one of the few places in Florida where, thanks to a program of the county's Leisure Services Department, you can ride horse on the beach.