Marineland of Florida

Marineland of Florida , one of Florida's first marine mammal parks, is billed as "the world's first oceanarium". Marineland functions as an entertainment and swim-with-the-dolphins facility, and reopened to the public on March 4, 2006 . In 2011, the park was purchased by the Georgia Aquarium for a reported 9.1 million U.S. dollars.
Marineland was first conceived by W. Douglas Burden, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Sherman Pratt, and Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy as an oceanarium that could be used to film marine life. A site was selected on the Atlantic Ocean south of St. Augustine, eventually known as the town of Marineland. The site of Marineland is within a 20,000-acre grant given to London barrister Levett Blackborne in 1767. The well-connected Blackborne, grandson of Sir Richard Levett, Lord Mayor of London, never settled his grant , and eventually Blackborne's plantation was regranted to John Graham, a Georgia Loyalist fleeing the Revolutionary War. Ultimately, the land that is today Marineland was broken up over the years into smaller parcels.

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