Are Mermaids Real?

At Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, the answer is, surprisingly, YES!

As unlikely as it sounds, this is a real place.

Here's the story. We're in Florida, happily escaping from cold winter weather, and my mom says, "When I was 6 years old, my family came to Florida and went to this place that was called Weeki Wachee and they had a live mermaid show."

For the most part, our response was composed of skeptical sideways glances, but my mom kept insisting that this was a real memory, that she had not invented Weeki Wachee out of the depths of her imagination. Finally, I took to Google and managed to find the website. What do you know? She was right!

None of us were entirely convinced that Weeki Wachee Springs State Park was a real, active, operating park with daily shows until we were actually there. We saw no billboards or advertisements for it as we were driving toward the area, and the park itself looks rather shabby and abandoned.

However, we discovered that the park was entirely real, and delivers exactly what it promises: mermaid shows, a riverboat ride, and a reptile show. And in my whole life I've never seen anything quite like the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee.

The theater itself is submerged underwater, and the mermaids/talented divers perform in a natural spring, with fish and turtles swimming around them. This park has been in existence and these mermaid performances have been going on for over 60 years now. The performers breathe through air tubes that they carry with them--but besides that slight concession to the human need to breathe, their ability to swim, dive, lip-sync, and perform at a depth of more than 10 feet under water is quite impressive.

As someone who loves performance but doesn't even put her head underwater when swimming, I was definitely impressed by thought of having a career that involved performances carried out entirely underwater.

The riverboat ride was very fun, and local wildlife seem quite abundant: we saw manatee, blue herons, eagles, and countless fish and turtles. It appears that Weeki Wachee isn't the kind of place that someone who had never been in the area would even know exists unless you read this blog post, but I assure you, it's real. And I doubt there's anything like it in the rest of the world. The mermaids do make it into a couple clips in Kelly Clarkson's Stronger music video, so there's another one of their claims to fame.

Have you ever stumbled across a mermaid show?

p.s. Sarah whispered to Dad during the mermaid show that she was pretty sure that the mermaids weren't real because she noticed them breathing from the tubes. Although, later in the day, she came up with an explanation that maybe they were real mermaids, but wanted us to think that they were humans pretending to be mermaids, so they just used the air tubes to mask their real identity.

p.p.s. This goes so perfectly with Ech's Travel Tuesday theme of "Not So Famous Favorites" that I had to link up!