Annual Events

Each year residents and visitors enjoy more than 1,000 special events and festivals, including the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, the St. Anthony's Triathlon, yachting events, the Mainsail Arts Festival, Green Thumb Festival, Bluesfest, American Stage in the Park, Snowfest and First Night St. Petersburg, the SHINE Mural Festival, Florida’s largest PRIDE celebration, and the nation’s longest-running parade honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Arts & Culture

Ranked as a top arts and cultural destination among cities its size, St. Pete is home to world-famous museums and independent galleries, a thriving performing arts scene, film festivals, live music, a vibrant literary arts community, a close-knit community of working artists and crafts-people, and a whole lot of public art and outdoor installations. Museums and galleries in St. Pete include The Dalí Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Fairgrounds St. Pete, The Chihuly Collection, Florida Holocaust Museum, The James Museum, St. Petersburg Museum of History, The Morean Arts Center, Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American History Museum, Florida CraftArt, and Great Explorations. St. Pete hosts The Florida Orchestra and St. Petersburg Opera, and features a year-long lineup of entertainment across venues like the Mahaffey Theater and the Palladium, as well as residential theater companies like Studio@620, freeFall Theatre, and American Stage. The arts are woven into the city, and their influence can be seen on street corners, down alleys, and alongside daily life. Musicians play in packed venues as well as back yards, filmmakers shoot and screen locally, live poetry is offered at cafés and breweries, there’s a roaming book bus, and our annual mural festival adorns our walls and streets with art from all over the globe.

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LGBTQ+ Community

St. Pete extends a warm welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and consistently ranks among the top cities for LGBTQ+ people to live and visit. Since 2014 St. Pete has earned a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Municipal Equality Index (MEI), which examines the laws, policies, and services of municipalities and rates them on the basis of their inclusivity of LGBTQ+  people who live and work there. St. Pete offers a spectrum of support and opportunities to the LGBTQ+ community, including LGBTQ+ visitor information, the Metro Inclusive Health LGBTQ+ Welcome Center, and the largest Pride celebration in Florida. 

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Natural Beauty

St. Pete is a peninsular city surrounded by 244 miles of shoreline along Tampa Bay, Boca Ciega Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the intracoastal waterways. The natural surroundings are a haven of biodiversity that offer a broad range of landscapes and habitats across the city. Approximately 2,300 acres of public land are dedicated to 137 parks and recreation areas, including a seven mile preserved downtown waterfront—the third largest urban waterfront park system in North America. Unique parks in or near St. Pete include the 245-acre Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, Sunken Gardens botanical park, historic Weedon Island Preserve, and Ft. Desoto Park. 

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Opportunity

As one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, St. Pete offers abundant opportunities that attract and retain businesses, investors, residents, and talent. From startups to Fortune 500s, St. Pete supports businesses small and large with systems and structures to help them launch, sustain, and thrive. Downtown development is booming and housing is expanding as more and more people are drawn to this area for the lifestyle and room to grow it provides. More than 265,000 people make their home here, living across 100+ distinct neighborhoods throughout the city and contributing to a regional workforce of over 1.4 million. We educate nearly 150,000 students across public, private, and technical schools and universities including St Petersburg College, Eckerd College, University of South Florida St. Petersburg, Pinellas Technical Education Center, and Stetson University College of Law, many of whom fall in love with the city and stay local after graduation. Ranked as one of the top cities to live, find a job, and start a business, St. Pete is a place to shine.

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Sports & Recreation

St. Pete hosts the Tampa Bay Rays (MLB), who play at Tropicana Field, and the Tampa Bay Rowdies (USL), who play at Al Lang Stadium, and roots for the regional home teams who play across the bay—the Tampa Bay Buccaneers  (NFL) and the Tampa Bay Lightning (NHL). Whether you’re watching or playing, St. Peter offers recreation for athletes and sports fans alike. St. Pete has three award-winning public golf courses, nine public pools, 60 lighted tennis courts, 25 pickle ball courts, six dog parks, three skateboard parks, a Jai Alai fronton, a frisbee golf course, a historic shuffleboard and lawn bowling complex, 16 recreation centers, the southeast's largest municipal marina, an airport, an extensive network of trails and bikeways including the Pinellas Trail, a 54-mile stretch from coast to coast, and the brand new St. Pete Pier.  

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Trivia

• St. Pete holds a Guinness World Record for logging the most consecutive days of sunshine—a stretch that began in 1967 and lasted 768 days. 

• The Sunshine Skyway Bridge, at 4.1 miles across, is one of the largest cable suspension bridges in the Western Hemisphere, rising 19 stories above Tampa Bay at its midpoint.

• St. Pete is the birthplace of scheduled aviation, with the flight of the Benoist Airboat, and the birthplace of Major League Baseball Spring Training—both in 1914.