Most people who live inside The Springs know the shorthand version of the story: there's a spring behind the clubhouse, the community grew up around it, and getting past the guard gate is the price of admission to swim in it. What fewer residents realize is that the spring didn't create the neighborhood's culture of public swimming. It ended one, and then, almost by accident, that same culture rebuilt itself down the road, open to anyone with a car and six dollars for parking.
That's the thing worth understanding about living here in the fall of 2026. The privacy behind the gate and the crowds down the road at Wekiva Island aren't two separate stories. They're the same spring-fed ritual, split in half by a single decision made more than fifty years ago.
The Spring Before the Gate
Long before it belonged to a homeowners association, the water behind today's clubhouse was known as Sanlando Springs, and it was one of the biggest public draws in Central Florida. A developer named James Franklin Haithcox bought the site in 1925, combined its name from Sanford and Orlando, and built it into a full tourist attraction complete with a 50-room hotel, a water slide, a diving board, and beauty contests, according to Orlando Weekly's archival account. Generations of Central Floridians came by the thousands from the 1920s through the 1970s, before Disney, SeaWorld, or Universal existed to compete for their attention.
Then, in 1970, private developers bought the land, closed public access, and built the gated community that carries the name today. The spring itself didn't move. The crowd did.
What Actually Closed, and What Didn't
Here's the part that gets lost in most retellings: the spring water didn't stop flowing when the gate went up. It still pools in the same swimming hole behind the clubhouse before draining into the Little Wekiva River, the same waterway it always fed. What closed in 1970 wasn't the spring. It was the public's ability to show up unannounced and jump in.
That distinction matters because the appetite for exactly that kind of afternoon never went away. It just needed a new address. Down the road, along the same river system, sits Wekiva Island, a business that has spent nearly two decades rebuilding the open-to-everyone version of what Sanlando Springs used to be, minus the diving board and the beauty pageant.
| Sanlando Springs, 1925 to 1970 | The private lagoon today | Wekiva Island today | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access | Public, paid admission | Residents and their guests only | Open to the public |
| Signature draw | Water slide, diving board, 50-room hotel | Swimming platform, quiet afternoon swim | Live music, cabanas, boat launch |
| Crowd | Thousands of Central Floridians each summer | Neighbors who grew up walking there | Families, paddlers, groups from across the region |
The Ritual That Moved Down the River
Wekiva Island calls itself Central Florida's favorite watering hole, and the phrase isn't just marketing. The property runs live music every Friday and Saturday night starting at 7 p.m., pairs it with a food truck called Without a Paddle Café and a bar called The Tooting Otter, and rents canoes, kayaks, and paddleboards for anyone who wants to work the river itself rather than just sit beside it.
The calendar leans into the seasons the same way the old Sanlando Springs once did. There's an annual Fall Egg Fest that closes the property until 5 p.m. before reopening for the evening crowd, and every April the Earth Day celebration brings a riverside market of local vendors, a guided river cleanup with Keep Seminole Beautiful, and animal encounters with the Central Florida Zoo and Audubon Center. One regular visitor summed up the feel of the place online as something like a neighborhood bar on the water, the kind of spot where everyone knows your name.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live inside the gate up the road. The version of Central Florida that Sanlando Springs used to represent, loud, communal, open to whoever showed up, didn't disappear when the community privatized. It just relocated downstream, and it's still running on the same river.
Behind the Gate, a Slower Kind of Calendar
Inside The Springs, the social rhythm that replaced the old public swimming days looks nothing like Wekiva Island's Friday night crowd, and that's by design. The HOA runs its own year-round calendar built around a Halloween Bash, an Easter Egg Roll, a Spring Concert, and a Visit From Santa, while the clubhouse hosts standing book club and bridge club meetings for residents who want something quieter than a seasonal event.
The athletic side of that calendar has been shifting too. Tennis has been the standard for decades, but pickleball has caught on fast enough that it now runs alongside the tennis program rather than underneath it, a small but real sign of how the community's day-to-day habits keep adjusting even inside a neighborhood that hasn't changed its footprint in fifty years.
Eight Pastures on the West Side
The other amenity that sets this community apart from a typical gated subdivision sits on its western half: a working stable with eight turnout pastures and a riding ring. It's an unusual thing to find this close to Orlando, let alone inside a gate that also has a swimming lagoon, tennis courts, and a clubhouse hosting bridge night. For residents who keep horses or simply enjoy walking past the paddocks, it's one more piece of evidence that this community was built at a scale and in an era when land here could still support that kind of use, something that's much harder to replicate in newer Seminole County developments.
The Wild Part of Living Here
None of this happens in a bubble. The Springs sits at the southeast corner of the Wekiva River Conservation Area, and living that close to protected woodland means sharing the neighborhood with more than just other residents. Neighborhoods on this west side of Longwood, in the same general stretch as Sabal Point, have shifted over recent years toward bear-resistant trash cans, a change residents credit with cutting down on encounters even as black bears keep foraging heavily through the fall as they prepare for winter.
The wildlife here isn't limited to bears. Back in May, a rhesus macaque was spotted wandering a field near Wekiva Springs State Park, close enough to Longwood that News 6 covered the sighting and Florida Fish and Wildlife had to remind residents not to approach or feed it. It's the kind of story that circulates fast in a neighborhood like this one, not because it's alarming, but because it's a reminder of exactly what backing up to a conservation area actually means day to day.
Two Halves of the Same Spring
Fifty-six years after the gate went up, the split still holds. Residents get a quieter, more scheduled version of spring-fed life behind the security guard, built around holiday parties and pickleball courts instead of diving boards and hotel guests. Down the road, the version of Central Florida that Sanlando Springs used to offer the public never actually ended. It just found a new name and a new dock.
Living in The Springs means having a foot in both. The quiet lagoon is yours because you live here. The louder one, with its Friday night music and its food truck, is still open to everyone, including you, whenever the quiet gets to be too much.
If you're a longtime resident who's ever wondered what decades of change like this mean for what your home in The Springs is actually worth today, Holt Real Estate has spent years tracking these Seminole County communities up close, and we're always glad to talk through it, no pressure, no obligation, just a straight answer from people who know this stretch of Longwood as well as you do.
