Clermont Is Florida’s Hill Country — Here’s How to Do It Right
Hills, a chain of lakes, a 1956 tower and a downtown that trains Olympians: Clermont is the least flat place in peninsular Florida. Our research-led guide to doing it properly — tower first, lake second, market on Sunday.
3 minute read
Every other town in Central Florida apologizes for being flat. Clermont leans into the opposite problem: it has hills, real ones, and everything interesting about the place — the citrus history, the lakefront downtown, the Olympians training at dawn — follows from that accident of geology. Clermont sits on the Lake Wales Ridge in south Lake County, about 25 miles west of downtown Orlando, and if you are building a first visit, this is how the town actually fits together. Start with our Clermont hub for the full picture, then work the pieces below.
Start at the tower, because everyone in 1956 did
The Florida Citrus Tower, at 141 N. Highway 27, is the town’s exclamation point: 226 feet of concrete opened on July 14, 1956, built so road-trippers could ride an elevator and look out over the citrus groves that then covered these hills in every direction. The groves are mostly gone — killed by the freezes of the 1980s and replaced by rooftops — but the glass-enclosed deck still delivers the geography lesson in one turn: Lake Minneola and Lake Minnehaha below, the ridge rolling away, a view the tower’s owners put at roughly 35 miles. Our full profile of the Citrus Tower tells its whole improbable survival story. Go early in the day, when the light is on the lakes.
Then go down to the water
Downtown Clermont sits on a hill above the south shore of Lake Minneola, and the slope between Montrose Street and the water is the town’s daily theater. Waterfront Park runs along the lake between East Avenue and Eighth Street, with a swimming beach, fishing piers, picnic ground and the Champions Splash Park for kids. A few blocks west, Victory Pointe folds a working stormwater filtration marsh into a 10-acre park with boardwalks and a 40-foot observation tower. We walk the whole shoreline in our guide to the Lake Minneola waterfront. On Sunday mornings, reverse the flow: the Downtown Clermont Farmers Market fills Montrose and Eighth streets from 9 a.m., run by Clermont Main Street, and the shops and cafés open around it.
Eat downtown, drink downtown
For a town its size, Clermont eats above its weight within about six walkable blocks. The Montrose Street Market food hall at 793 W. Montrose is the group’s answer to decision paralysis; The Crooked Spoon, the chef-driven gastropub out by the Citrus Tower, is the sit-down splurge; and Suncreek Brewery, pouring since 2018 at 790 W. Minneola Avenue, anchors the evening. Our current rundown is where to eat in Clermont right now, and the brewery gets its own profile in our Suncreek story. Nothing in Clermont has been scored by our rankings yet — this is a research-led guide, not a ranked list, and we would rather tell you that plainly.
Respect the hills: they are the gym
Clermont’s second identity is athletic. The Orlando Health National Training Center has operated here since 2001 as a USA Triathlon-certified performance center, and the town’s motto — Choice of Champions — is earned on roads that actually climb. Just north of town, plainly labeled as nearby rather than in Clermont proper, Sugarloaf Mountain rises 312 feet, the highest point on the Florida peninsula and the most prominent point in the state; cyclists make pilgrimages to suffer on it. The paved South Lake Trail threads the lakefront and heads east toward Winter Garden, and Clermont sits at the midpoint of the Florida Coast-to-Coast Trail. Read our training-town briefing before you attempt any of it in August.
The quiet ends of the day
Save the Clermont Historic Village, at West Avenue and Osceola Street, for a weekend afternoon — its seven relocated buildings, including the Townsend House and the old train depot, open Saturday and Sunday afternoons. And if you have a second day, drive south on US-27 to Lake Louisa State Park, at the city’s southern edge, where 4,300 acres of cypress lakes and trails reset the pace entirely. Both get full treatment in our Historic Village profile and our Lake Louisa guide. Find Clermont and everything around it on the Orlando Top Spots Map — then come see why the hills change everything.
Photo: Jared, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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