Wekiwa Springs: The Suburb That Lives Beside a Spring
Wekiwa Springs is 23,428 people in Seminole County whose subdivisions carry the Wekiva spelling and whose reason for existing is spelled the other way: a 72-degree spring and the state park wrapped around it.
1 minute read
Most suburbs are named for a developer’s fancy. Wekiwa Springs is named for a fact of geology: Wekiwa is the Creek-Seminole word for “a spring,” and the spring it names — a second-magnitude vent pouring out more than 40 million gallons of 72-degree water a day — sits in the state park at the community’s western edge. The census-designated place around it held 23,428 people at the 2020 census, across 9.13 square miles of Seminole County. This is the magazine’s Wekiwa Springs hub in article form.
A community in the park’s orbit
Wekiwa Springs State Park, some 7,000 acres of sandhill, hammock and river floodplain, is the largest single fact in the community’s life. The subdivisions — most of them spelled Wekiva, a variant the developers preferred and the river also carries — fill the ground east of the park, in the established, canopy-heavy grain of northwest Seminole County. Residents here measure their luck in minutes-to-the-spring, and on summer weekends they share their roads with the rest of Orlando coming to swim.
The honest rankings picture
The magazine’s Top Businesses rankings have not scored a business inside Wekiwa Springs yet, and this hub says so plainly. Its ranked tables are borrowed, with their home areas named, from Apopka, Altamonte Springs and Longwood — the Ranked Nearby pattern — and plotted on the Top Spots Map. What Wekiwa Springs already has needs no scoring: a state park at the end of the street, a National Wild and Scenic River at its headwaters, and a suburb that knows exactly why it is where it is.
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