Longboat Key

Longboat Key's name is commonly traced to the longboats of Spanish exploration — local tradition ties it to a scouting boat from the de Soto expedition era, though the attribution is folklore as much as fact. Homesteaders farmed and fished the island in the late 1800s, but its modern identity begins with John Ringling, who started buying large tracts of the key in 1923 at the height of the Florida land boom. In 1926 Ringling began building a grand Ritz-Carlton hotel on the south end, complete with planned rail access — then halted construction that November as the boom collapsed. The unfinished 'Ghost Hotel' stood as a landmark ruin for nearly four decades before being demolished in 1963-64.

The town of Longboat Key incorporated in 1955, and the transformation into a refined resort-residential island accelerated in 1959, when Arthur Vining Davis's Arvida Corporation purchased roughly 2,000 acres — including the southern half of the key and the old Ringling holdings — for $13.5 million. Arvida's decades of development produced the pattern that defines the island today: Gulf-front condominiums and club communities along the beach side, canal-home neighborhoods like Country Club Shores on the bay side, and the Longboat Key Club's golf and resort grounds anchoring the south end. The island runs about ten miles, threaded by a single road, Gulf of Mexico Drive, and is split almost evenly between Sarasota County on the south end and Manatee County on the north.

The 2024 hurricane season was the hardest chapter in the town's modern history. Hurricane Helene sent a measured storm surge of more than six feet across the island in late September, and Hurricane Milton followed two weeks later with hurricane-force winds from a landfall just south at Siesta Key. Town damage assessments ran well north of $170 million, a large share of the island's residential units reported damage, and an estimated several hundred thousand cubic yards of beach and dune sand were lost. Since then the island has been in determined recovery: an interim beach renourishment was completed in early 2026, a much larger renourishment program is being planned and budgeted with FEMA, state, and tourist-tax funding, and the hardest-hit ground-level communities are still working through reconstruction as of mid-2026.