Gainesville Audioguides

Gainesville, Florida is primarily a university city, home to the University of Florida and its 55,000 students -- a population large enough to give the city an energy that extends well beyond football Saturdays at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, known as The Swamp. But the city has an outsized cultural footprint. Tom Petty spent his childhood in Gainesville, played in the first bands that would eventually produce the Heartbreakers, and remained emotionally connected to the city his whole life. The Tom Petty Park on SW 34th Street opened in 2021. Gatorade, the sports drink that changed athletic hydration globally, was developed by University of Florida researchers in 1965 specifically to help the Florida Gators football team perform in the brutal Gainesville heat.

Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, just south of the city, is the first Florida state preserve and holds a landscape unlike almost anything in the American Southeast: a 21,000-acre basin with bison, wild horses descended from Spanish stock, sandhill cranes, and alligators visible from the main observation tower.

The Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus has the largest collection of fossils in the southeastern United States and a butterfly rainforest enclosure where hundreds of live butterflies fly freely around visitors year-round.