Last updated on November 16th, 2025 at 11:32 am
Perhaps no other Florida attraction has performed the equivalent of a Houdini act with fate like Marineland.
The attraction opened in 1938 to great fanfare along a remote strip of State Road A1A just north of Flagler Beach. It has gone through several transformations, with closures and rumors of closures, only to re-emerge and endure.
As of November 2025, it has happened again: Owners of the attraction filed for bankruptcy and real estate developers were bidding for the oceanfront property. At the last minute, though, a group of Florida citizens outbid the developers, and their goal is to maintain the historic attraction as a site devoted to marine mammals. The winning bid was $7.1 million. (Here are details from local news accounts.)
The remarkable story of the how Marineland was created
Marine Studios was its initial identity, created primarily to film underwater scenes for television and motion pictures.
It was an untried endeavor, conceived by Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy), Sherman Pratt and two wealthy cousins, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and W. Douglas Burden. They worked with Jacksonville filmmaker Merian Cooper, producer of the original King Kong.
Many doubted that a facility could be built of adequate size to meet the needs of both large marine animals and filming. The designers proved the skeptics wrong, creating the world’s first oceanarium.
The oceanarium buildings had numerous portholes that enabled visitors and a growing number of marine researchers and film crews to peer into an undersea world as if in a submarine under the sea.
The architecture was described as “nautical moderne.” Writers with the Work Projects Administration (WPA) in 1939 described the tanks with their square portholes as “resembling a stranded Caribbean cruiser.”
During World War II, the attraction closed to the public because both the staff and facility were needed for the war effort. The Coast Guard worked on developing shark repellent at the oceanarium and a high point on the property was used as a lookout for enemy submarines in the Atlantic.
Marineland Florida: Discovering how to train dolphins
The post-war Baby Boom was kind to the facility when it reopened to the public in 1946 and it enjoyed several good years. The attraction boasted the first successful dolphin birth in human care in 1947, a dolphin named Spray.
Behind the scenes, using a sonagraph, Marineland researchers were the first to measure and record dolphin echolocation and other sounds, an effort that continues as scientists seek to break the code of dolphin communication.
Marineland also came upon something quite by accident that would help to emblazon its image in the eyes of the public. Handlers noticed that dolphins in the oceanarium seemed highly intelligent and were doing tricks and maneuvers at feeding time, perhaps seeking extra fish. By holding fish higher and higher, dolphins would oblige by jumping and leaping.
A question was posed, “Can a dolphin be trained?”
In 1949, veteran circus animal trainer Adolf Frohn was hired in a first-ever attempt to train dolphins, focusing on a highly intelligent dolphin named Flippy.
By 1951, Flippy had learned six behaviors as part of the world’s first aerial dolphin act: ringing a suspended bell, honking a bulb horn, catching a football, raising a flag, towing a surfboard with either a small dog or girl aboard, and bursting through a paper-covered hoop. Frohn even trained Flippy to swim onto a stretcher for medical care, another first.
Marineland stayed true to its roots as a film studio. It helped produce feature films, such as underwater footage for Creature of the Black Lagoon in 1954 and the sequel, Revenge of the Creature, in 1955.
Underwater scenes for the television series “Sea Hunt” were also filmed at Marineland, followed by a Benji television movie in which the canine star scuba dived with a large glass dome over his head, a first. During these glory years, the attraction often drew more than 300,000 visitors annually. Celebrities of the time, Ernest Hemingway and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings among them, visited the attraction’s Moby Dick Lounge.
Marineland’s pioneering success led to an expansion of the concept, the first being the Miami Seaquarium (which opened in 1955 and just closed in October 2025.) Seaquarium lured away several key dolphin trainers who eventually created the world’s best known dolphin—Flipper. Flippy had difficulty competing with a television star.
Still, Marineland persevered and remained one of Florida’s top attractions during the 1960s and into the 70s. Because the surrounding town was called Marineland, Marine Studios was changed to Marineland in 1961 so it would be on all the maps.
SeaWorld challenged Marineland Florida, and then hurricanes hit
The emergence of SeaWorld Orlando in 1973, a mega marine theme park, took the biggest bite out of Marineland’s attendance.
After that, Marineland went through several owners, closed briefly in 1999 due to Hurricanes Floyd and Irene, and closing longer in 2004 due to damage from Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne.
Several of the historic structures and exhibits had to be demolished and some of the property was sold to the Trust for Public Land to be turned over to Flagler County for a park.
Many believed the world’s first oceanarium would suffer the same fate of other Florida attractions now long-gone, but Marineland morphed again. A new 1.3 million gallon facility was built that focused more on animal-human interactions and education.
Marineland Florida offered innovative dolphin programs
When the park reopened in 2006, it was known as Marineland’s Dolphin Conservation Center, and in 2011 it was sold to Georgia Aquarium and renamed Marineland Dolphin Adventure. The Georgia Aquarium sold the property in 2019 to Dolphin Discovery Group, which is the company that went bankrupt in 2025.
If developers had purchased the property, all 17 dolphins and other animals at the attraction would have been forced to be relocated. Under the sale agreement, all animals currently housed at Marineland will remain at the facility except three dolphins that will be sold to Theater of the Sea in the Florida Keys. (Those three were recent arrivals, moved to Marineland after another facility shut down.)
The dolphin facility has a sophisticated system of caring for the marine mammals. Various tanks are connected with gates and channels that allow animals to be together, or divided into social groups as circumstances may require, often changing throughout the day.
Many dolphin babies were born here over the years. (There has been a voluntary moratorium on collecting wild bottlenose dolphins since the 1980s.)
The new owners of Marineland have backgrounds as marine mammal advocates. No details of how the operation will operate have been announced.
Things to do near Marineland Florida:
- St. Augustine: Ideal for history and nature lovers
- Washington Oaks Gardens State Park — Historic oak-shaded gardens and a beach with fantastically shaped coquina rocks on the other.
- Princess Place Preserve — A delightful place to hike, kayak, camp and tour the lovely 1888 hunting lodge, which has a great story of a real princess behind it.
- Ormond Loop Trail – Scenic drive through shady oak hammocks, sea marshes and islands of the Halifax River south of Flagler Beach.
- Fort Matanzas — A small historic Spanish fort on the lovely Matanzas Inlet, which you can visit for free via a National Park Service ferry.
Bonnie Gross updated this article originally written by Doug Aldersen.
Alderson wrote a history of Florida’s roadside attractions A New Guide to Old Florida Attractions: From Mermaids to Singing Towers, published by Pineapple Press.
