De Soto Trail Monument

Near this site, Hernando de Soto and his men landed on May 30, 1539, and began marching westward toward the Mississippi River, reaching Florida during the expedition's four hundredth-anniversary year in 1939. The granite De Soto Trail Monument was dedicated on May 30, 1939, and in 1948 the monument and surrounding acreage were donated to the National Park Service. Surrounding it are gumbo limbo trees, also called West Indian birch or gum elemi, a Florida native found from Cape Canaveral southward to the West Indies and Central America. Their cuttings have been used as living fence posts in Cuba and the West Indies, their red aromatic resin was used to treat gout and as a varnish, and legend says pirates carried their limbs to mark treasure burial spots. Because it stands in the sun, turns red, and peels, some call the gumbo limbo the tourist tree; the trees here are among the country's largest registered examples and are thought to have been here since the 1930s.

Florida · United States