Smyrna Dunes Park

Parks are as different as people. As different as birds! Smyrna Dunes Park is different from all the rest. Its 250 acres overlook Mosquito Lagoon, then border the south side of Ponce de Leon Inlet before sweeping around to follow the Atlantic Ocean.

To prevent human damage to the fragile dunes protected by the park, a two-mile-long boardwalk meanders through coastal forest and salt marsh, crossing the dunes to inlet shore and ocean beach. Benches and picnic tables await here and there.

There are birds and birds and birds! Birders leave with fond memories of Smyrna Dunes Park: a Peregrine Falcon on the balcony of a nearby condo, a Clapper Rail in a small marshy pond, rafts and rafts of shore birds, a Christmas Day after a severe freeze when every gull on the beach feasted upon its very own Christmas dinner - one of hundreds of fish killed by the cold and washed ashore.

All kinds of shorebirds! Warblers and migrant songbirds in the woods! Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphins, sometimes with their young, sometimes putting on an acrobatics show worthy of Sea World. The beach may have grown since your last visit. It receives the eroded sand lost by its neighbor across the inlet,   Lighthouse Point Park, to the action of the ocean waves. After your trek, a covered picnic pavilion and restroom facilities await you in a shady nook.

Hours: sunrise to sunset Admission: $3.50. Call Volusia County Leisure Services at (386) 424-2935.

back to parks page