The real life mermaids of Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs

In the Newton Perry Underwater Theatre, a steel-drum cover of ​‘Under The Sea’ plays on repeat over tinny speakers. The crowd is the kind you only ever assemble in the cheap months, on the cheap midweek slot, a glorious cross-section of the American interior: tattooed young fathers bouncing toddlers on their knee, both in matching Ariel shirts; rows of patient senior citizens with nowhere better to be; a troupe of glittered Disney adults who have clearly made a day of it. The rest are a scattering of curious passers-by, wearing a frown of scepticism that I hope will evaporate as soon as the show begins.

The auditorium fits 450 people, and every space is taken on the hard wooden benches as I descend into the aggressively air-conditioned Floridian dungeon. It is cut directly out of the limestone, and the sunlight refracts through the turquoise water to bathe the room in a celestial blue light. The show starts in five minutes, my ticket-checker breathlessly informs me, impressing upon me that I really will be lucky to get a seat.

Because word travels fast around these parts. You don’t want to be late for the Weeki Wachee mermaids.

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There are many ways to understand Florida.

You can understand it through retirement communities and hurricanes. You can understand it through orange groves and alligators, through spring breakers and golf carts.

Or you can understand it through a mermaid show at Weeki Wachee, a living relic of the sunburnt madness of Old Florida, where, for nearly eighty years, young women wearing sequined tails and pinned smiles have performed underwater ballet for visitors. 

Before Disney arrived in the ​’70s, casting its dark murine shadow over the entire state, Florida tourism was essentially a rickety fever dream stitched together by swamp enthusiasts, crafty-eyed opportunists and pioneering hucksters – anyone who might look at a sinkhole and think: we could charge admission to this. Florida was, as it remains today, one enormous machine for separating jorted Midwesterners from their holiday savings. Back then, however, they went about the fleecing in a far more homespun fashion.

Florida in the 1950s was not yet the Florida of gated communities and six-lane highways. Much of it was still jungle, scrubland and mosquito-ridden swamps. Small roads were just about paved, criss-crossing the boggy interior to connect the new towns popping up all over the state.

The American post-war boom and mass proliferation of the automobile meant the holiday du jour was to pack the family into a Buick station wagon and head on down to sunny Florida. And once they got there, there was no shortage of lurid and chaotic enticements trying their best to lure in the pale, road-tripping families. Because if there was one thing those early Floridian pioneers understood, and understood correctly, it was this: what this new breed of tourist wanted was not sophistication, but spectacle.

Floridian tourism was a ramshackle collection of weird roadside attractions, shot through with a deep and abiding faith that if something was sufficiently peculiar, somebody would pay 50 cents to see it. You could drive for ten miles and encounter parrots pedalling tiny bicycles, water-skiing Southern belles in hoop skirts, or Seminole men wrestling alligators bare-handed. Monkey Jungle, which opened outside Miami in 1933, pondered what might happen if humans were in cages and it was the monkeys that roamed free? The answer – tourists would pay to shuffle around in enclosed walkways whilst rhesus monkeys and capuchins roamed freely overhead. 

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Into this world stepped Newton Perry.

Perry was a former Navy man and swimming instructor who had become fascinated by the crystal-clear springs bubbling up from the limestone beneath central Florida. The water was so transparent that it seemed almost magical. Perry had recently invented underwater breathing hoses and used to put on aquatic demonstrations for tourists. One day, staring into the spring and following that rich vein of Floridian chutzpah, he asked himself a question: ​“What if there were mermaids?”

And just like that, in 1947, Weeki Wachee was born.

Weeki Wachee, which means ​“little spring” in the native Seminole language, lies about an hour north of Tampa. It is a natural spring 117ft deep that pumps out more than a hundred million gallons of fresh water every day. And it is this spring that Perry gazed into like Narcissus. Emboldened, he dug out a swimming hole, recruited a cast of local high-school girls and waitresses, then taught them to breathe from air hoses hidden among the rocks.

The training was rigorous, and the women had to be real athletes. You cannot fake elegance while holding your breath and avoid inhaling half a spring. They learned to blow rings from their hoses and mastered handstands underwater. Some could stay submerged for minutes at a time. And all the while they had to maintain the illusion. No coughing, no panicking, no surfacing unexpectedly. Because nothing ruins the fantasy quite like a mermaid emerging in a fit spluttering up spring water.

The theatre itself was absurd, an 18-seat auditorium built six feet below the surface. Visitors descended into the earth like Bond villains and peered through the just-about-strong-enough-glass window into a submerged world where mermaids in glittering nylon tails floated past like aquatic chorus girls. The performers mastered all sorts of tricks. They drank grape juice underwater. They ate bananas underwater. They even played cards underwater. One particularly famous routine involved a synchronised underwater ballet set to orchestral music – a gimmick that would eventually make Weeki Wachee famous around the world.

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It was tough going at first. In those early days, according to Weeki Wachee lore, the women would sit around listening out for the sound of a car rumbling down Route 19, then dash out in their swimsuits to try and flag the driver down. If they snared so much as a single customer, a full show would be put on. By the 1950s, they no longer had to. Word had got out, and the golden age of the American road trip delivered a steady stream of curious travellers.

By the 1960s, Weeki Wachee had become one of America’s biggest tourist attractions. More people visited it than many newly-minted national parks. As many as nine shows a day were put on at its peak. 

Celebrities started passing through, first Don Knotts, then Elvis – resulting in the predictable scream fest of oestrogenic excitement. The mermaids began travelling, touring the country performing in giant tanks. They appeared on Ed Sullivan. They even represented Florida at world fairs.

The women themselves became local celebrities. Young girls all over Florida dreamed of joining their ranks. The auditions were fiercely competitive. Applicants – often more than 200 for one spot – had to smile open-eyed underwater, possess strong swimming skills, and demonstrate enough submarine poise to convince tourists that they were descendants of Poseidon rather than teenagers from Tampa.

Weeki Wachee even had its own royal court. A Mermaid queen was appointed, and former performers were minted as lifelong legends. Some spent decades attached to the springs, returning long after retirement to wave at visitors like former World Cup winners and reminisce about the years they spent under water.

At its peak, Weeki Wachee wasn’t just a tourist attraction. It was a cultural symbol, a vision of post-war American optimism and kitsch. Everything back then seemed possible. Cars had fins, housewives wore pearls to vacuum the white picket house, and somewhere in central Florida, mermaids performed underwater interpretations of Peter Pan.

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Then came Disney.

When Walt Disney World opened in Orlando in 1971, it was as though somebody had parked the Death Star next to the village fair. Tourism changed overnight. The quirky roadside attractions that had once flourished across Florida suddenly seemed quaint and old-fashioned. Visitors wanted Space Mountain, not Stacey from Hernando Beach pretending to be Ariel’s aunt.

Attendance began to decline. Ownership changed hands repeatedly. For a while it seemed entirely possible that Weeki Wachee would disappear into history, remembered only through faded postcards and elderly Floridians regaling disbelieving grandchildren about the mermaids they saw perform when they were their age.

The park fell into disrepair, pastel paint peeling and statues chipping, and by 2001 it was in real danger of closing for good. It was kept alive only by the fundraising and ferocity of former mermaids and people who loved the park. Then, in 2008, an archangel arrived in the form of the state itself. Florida at last recognised that this icon of Old Florida tourism was worth saving, and designated Weeki Wachee an official state park. Its future was secure.

Today, remarkably little has changed. The drive in from Orlando still takes you through swamps and farmland, only now the strip malls, pawn shops and trailer parks arrive long before the tree-lined car park of Weeki Wachee.

I eventually find a seat in the auditorium, just as a video of Mr Margaritaville himself, Jimmy Buffett, crackles onto the wall-mounted televisions. He launches into a rendition of Fins, featuring a quartet of smiling and costumed Weeki Wachee mermaids being wheeled on stage to backing-dance from their seats. Around me are grandparents in visors, sunburnt dads in fishing shirts, and little girls in glittering mermaid tails clutching plush dolphins.

The lights dim and a syrupy-voiced MC asks us if we’re ready for the mermaids. Inevitably, we are not quite ready enough, and are encouraged to express our excitement a little more vocally.

The dusty blue satin curtain slowly winches itself open, to reveal a thick wall of glass, behind which lies the famous spring itself. A water so clear and turquoise it hardly looks like water at all. Schools of tiny fish drift lazily across the scene. A turtle paddles past with supreme indifference.

And then, rising out of some deeper part of the spring, comes a mermaid.

She emerges into view in a sequined bikini top and glittering red tail. She swims the entire width of the theatre window horizontally, waving to the audience with the fixed, radiant smile of a Strictly contestant. Little girls leap from the seats and rush to the front, pressing their palms against the glass as though greeting royalty.

This, a warm pre-recorded voice informs us as the music kicks in, is The Little Mermaid. And what we are about to witness is an underwater reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved fairy tale.

Two more mermaids glide into frame. The three of them gather together and immediately begin lip-syncing and dancing to Weeki Wachee’s signature anthem, ​‘We’ve Got the World by the Tail’. It is a gloriously earnest show tune in which the mermaids explain they are not like ordinary women and that they shall never grow old. Though it sounds pure Eisenhower era, the whole show was written in 1991, deep in the darkest struggles of Weeki Wachee, its struggling owners desperate to recreate some of that post-war confidence.

The plot, such as it can be in a 15 minute show, unfolds beneath the surface. It is the mermaid’s 15^th birthday party, and a handsome prince soon drops into the water. They fall in love, à la the story, before an evil sea witch appears and scuppers the whole shebang.

The mermaids still swim their graceful loops, they still twirl, backflip and dance. They still, with all the discretion of smokers slipping out for a fag break at a wedding, take quick, almost embarrassed breaths from the floating air hoses. And the audience still remains utterly, unashamedly invested.

The show reaches its climax with the famous Weeki Wachee manœuvre. The three women clasp each other’s tails and begin rotating together in a great underwater circle, like a strange aquatic hamster wheel. We are informed by the voiceover that the mermaids can hear our applause through the water. The crowd goes wild. The mermaids take their curtain call.

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Afterwards, as I stagger out blinking into the bright Floridian sunlight, I walk past the Hall of Fame, a sheltered lobby nailed with photographs of past mermaid legends. Those very same smiling girls who appeared on Ed Sullivan in the ​’60s, who represented Florida at state fairs, who gave Elvis a run for his money.

Outside, one of today’s mermaids is posing for photographs with tongue-tied young fans. We fall into conversation, and she tells me with utter conviction how she grew up watching the show, and now, here she is, fulfilling her dream. It no longer pays the way it used to, and for many mermaids it is their second or third job. But it still represents what it always has: optimistic escapism.

And that, really, is the beauty of Weeki Wachee. The fact that it still exists at all.

In an age of algorithms and identical shopping centres, there is something deeply charming about this weird little relic from another age. It belongs to a disappearing America, a world of eccentric dreamers and roadside oddities, a place built not by multinationals but by a strange patchwork of showmen and snake-oil salesmen.

In a world increasingly designed by consultants and focus groups, there is something reassuring about the knowledge that somewhere in Florida, deep beneath the surface of a spring, the mermaids of Weeki Wachee are still alive and kicking.

Jack Burke is a freelance journalist and sometimes chef. Follow him on Instagram.

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