Jacksonville is a city in Florida.
It is the seat of Duval County, with which the city government consolidated in 1968.
As of June 2019, the population of Jacksonville is about 900,000 people. It is the most populous city in Florida, the most populous city in the southeastern United States.
The city is situated on the banks of the St. Johns River in the First Coast region of northeast Florida.
Jacksonville covers a total area of 2,265 square kilometers (875 square miles). It is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States.
While still in the North American Coastal plain, the topography begins to take on slight Piedmont characteristics. Like the Central Florida ridge and the Piedmont, the area begins sloping several miles inland. On the west-side of Jacksonville a series of low ridges predominates.
The highest point of Jacksonville rises to 58 meters (190 feet) above sea level on Trail Ridge just along the boundary with Baker County.
The region was originally inhabited by Timucua peoples.
Fort Caroline National Memorial marks the site of Florida’s first European (French Huguenot) settlement (1564), which was destroyed by Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565.
A platted town was established there in 1822, a year after the United States gained Florida from Spain; it was named after Andrew Jackson, the first military governor of the Florida Territory and seventh President of the United States.
Its development was halted or slowed by the Great Fire of 1901, the Florida Land Bust of the 1920s, and the economic woes of the 1960s and 70s.
Diverse economic base, young, energetic population, and high quality of life, Jacksonville experienced substantial growth during the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens sits at the mouth of the Trout River, near where it flows into the St. Johns River. The zoo occupies approximately 117 acres (47 ha) and has over 2,000 animals and 1,000 plants in its collection. The zoo has grown from its modest beginnings in Springfield to be considered one of the city’s premier attractions, with more than one million visitors in the past year.
The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens was founded in 1961 after the death of Ninah Cummer, who bequeathed her gardens and personal art collection to the new museum. The Cummer Museum has since expanded to include the property owned by Ninah’s brother-in-law, but it still includes her original garden designs and a portion of her home with its historic furnishing. The permanent collection of the museum currently includes over five thousand works of art dating from 2100 BCE to the twenty-first century. The museum and gardens attract 130,000 visitors annually.
Friendship Fountain is a large fountain in Jacksonville. The world’s largest and tallest fountain when it opened, it has been one of Jacksonville’s most recognizable and popular attractions. The fountain and park were designed by Jacksonville architect Taylor Hardwick in 1963 and opened in 1965.
Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park is a 2.4 kilometer (1.5-mile) public beach and city park in Jacksonville, Florida. It is located at Mayport in the Jacksonville Beaches area. It consists of 181 hectares (447 acres) of mature coastal hammock, which is increasingly rare along Florida’s heavily developed Atlantic coast.
Catty Shack Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary is a nonprofit organization located in Jacksonville. The mission of Catty Shack Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary is to provide a safe, loving and forever home to endangered big cats and to educate the public about their plight in the wild and in captivity. Residents of the sanctuary include lions, tigers, cougars, leopards, bobcats, foxes, and coatimundis (which are not big cats, but actually members of the raccoon family, with very long snouts). None of the animals living here have ever been bought, sold, or traded; they’ve all been brought here (mostly by owners who couldn’t care for them properly).
People from Jacksonville may be called “Jacksonvillians” or “Jaxsons” (also spelled “Jaxons”).
Jacksonville Real estate market is awesome and probably in the top 20 of the USA. A lot of out of town and foreign investors are buying up everything.
Few people know that Jacksonville was actually the first Hollywood. In the early-1900s, this was the motion-picture capital of the world, a thriving film and production location before anyone east of Los Angeles had ever heard of that other Hollywood.
Tourism is important to the Jacksonville area, particularly tourism related to golf.