Tips & Guides

The Lakes of Buenaventura Lakes

The name is the geography: a community wrapped around Lake Buenaventura and its chain of neighbourhood lakes.

1 minute read

ShareFacebookX

The name is the geography: Buenaventura Lakes is a community built around water. Its namesake, Lake Buenaventura, sits at the community’s heart, and the subdivisions wrap a small chain of lakes and ponds in northern Osceola County — close enough together that in BVL, a street “on the lake” is not a prestige address category. It is just a lot of the streets.

Living with the water

These are neighbourhood lakes, not resort lakes — no marinas, no rental fleets, no boardwalk economy. Their role in the community’s life is quieter: the evening walk that routes past the water, the backyard that ends at a shoreline, the herons and ibis that treat the ponds as their own subdivision. The streets named for lakes make the geography legible from a car window; the streets named for Mexican cities — Oaxaca, Acapulco, Veracruz — are the other half of the community’s layered story, told in our Little Puerto Rico piece.

Getting to the shore

Access is mostly residential: the lakes belong to the streets around them, and the public way into this landscape is the community’s shared ground — Buenaventura Lakes Community Park on the boulevard, a few streets from the water. Visitors looking for a big public lakefront with a beach and a promenade should make the short trip the community itself makes, to the Kissimmee lakefront — we cover it as a day trip, and our Kissimmee hub has the detail.

The honest note

Florida subdivisions and Florida water are old partners, and BVL’s lakes come with the standard fine print: they are stormwater country as much as scenery, alligators are a fact of any Central Florida freshwater shore, and the lakes’ beauty is of the everyday kind — light on still water at the end of a street — rather than the postcard kind. The community would not trade it. The name on the map is the lakes; the lakes are still there underneath everything that got built around them.

Filed under · ·

Editor’s Picks

  1. 1NewsEpic Universe Faces Its First Holiday Season
  2. 2ReviewsThe 10 Best Coffee Shops in Orlando
  3. 3TourismMagic Kingdom
  4. 4Top BusinessesHaan Coffee: Mills 50’s Korean-Inflected Roaster Tops Orlando Coffee
  5. 5ReviewsThe 10 Best Attractions & Things To Do in Orlando

Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank

Claire Donovan

Claire Donovan covers the tourist economy for Orlando Citizen - the jobs, taxes, traffic and wages behind the visitor numbers. She reports from official sources: the airport authority, the county comptroller, Visit Orlando and the parks companies, always from the resident side of the story.