Gulf Shores and Orange Beach in Alabama, along with Perdido Beach, Florida, have been branded as Pleasure Island. There is a strip of hotels, condos, restaurants, souvenir shops, shopping venues, attractions, art galleries, a zoo, ziplines, and beautiful white-sand beaches that run along the south Alabama coast and western Panhandle Florida coast.  The great advantage of staying anywhere along Pleasure Island is easy access to everything that’s offered in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Perdido Key, and Foley, from a water park and other attractions to some of the better restaurants on the Gulf Coast.

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This gorgeous coast attracted fishermen and women since the early 20th Century, and many built small beach cabins on the shore. But since the 1980s, the coast has developed into a highly sought-after vacation spot, with more reasonable pricing for accommodations and attractions than the higher profile Florida coast from Pensacola east.

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Today, Pleasure Island draws visitors from numerous states and offers many condo rental units and rental houses, charter fishing, sailboat cruises, boat rentals, a variety of water sports, and other attractions.  While Foley isn’t really part of Pleasure Island, its proximity to Gulf Shores makes it part of the mix and extends the offerings on the coast to a large Tanger outlet mall, several antique stores, additional restaurants such as the “home of the throwed rolls” Lambert’s Café, and OWA, a relatively new amusement park that includes a variety of amusement rides and additional restaurants.

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History

The culture of the Gulf Coast evolved from a mishmash of native, Spanish, French, British, early American, and African-American influences, as well as Italian, German, Irish, Scottish, Caribbean, Jewish, and other races and ethnicities that have come to its shores by sea, by land, and by air.

Historians think the first European to see the Gulf Coast was Álvarez de Pineda, who, in the early 1500s, drew a rough map showing the outline of the coast, and thereby providing evidence that the water that lay north of Jamaica was a sea or gulf. He called it the Golfo de México. Little is known about Pineda, but his map showed sailors and geographers what the gulf looked like.

 

What Pineda would have seen on shore was flat land spreading out to the north, great and smaller rivers flowing into the salt water sea, rounded huts with roofs of grass or palm leaves built by thriving indigenous peoples who fished the waters and hunted its shores for hundreds of years. Hundreds of thousands lived on the coast then, with powerful defenses against invaders and effective communication networks that quickly spread the word of the Spanish ships and the invasions of Mexico and the Caribbean long before the Spaniards ever laid eyes on their villages.

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The Spanish sailed north in the 16th Century from Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica to discover new lands to conquer. They first landed on what is now the western Florida coast, and slowly moved northward. They sought gold and silver like was found in Mexico and South America; and as they ran out of food on their voyages, they raided villages for something to eat.

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They found nothing but hostile natives and seafood (oysters and mullet especially), which wasn’t to their liking. Most of these Spanish invaders were either killed by the coastal natives, died during storms, or starved to death. 

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A hundred years later, the French and British moved into the Gulf, seeking not gold and silver, but land on which to settle and thereby enlarge their empires. By then, the indigenous peoples were thinned out by diseases like smallpox and measles brought by the Spaniards.

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The French ultimately pushed the Spanish out of the upper Gulf Coast, and established settlements on Mobile Bay’s shore by the end of the 1600s.  Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, led an expedition for France into the Gulf of Mexico in 1698-99, establishing a settlement near present-day Ocean Springs, Mississippi. In 1702, he moved his colony to Mobile Bay, establishing the city of Mobile on the upper shores of Mobile Bay, on the Mobile River. His younger brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur d’ Bienville, oversaw construction of the city. This, with earlier Spanish incursion around Pensacola Bay, accounted for the first settlement of what is known today as the Alabama and upper Florida coast.

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Hence, today’s coastal culture has both French and Spanish influence, as well as British, American, and African-American, after the British, and then the new Americans, took over this part of the coast in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. When the ports opened up to a thriving economy, others from around the world moved in as well.

 

The influence can be seen in the names of towns, like Spanish Fort, Chickasaw, and Mobile. They can be seen in some of the architecture, such as buildings in downtown Mobile that sported decorative cast iron railings on second-floor balconies, representative of Spanish construction.

 

Houses in Mobile included Spanish colonial styles, creole cottages, Gulf Coast cottages built by Irish settlers, and Italianate style mansions.  The Gulf Coast cottages were single-story structures with a Caribbean style porch that extended across the front with unadorned square pillars and floor-to-ceiling windows across the front. (For more history of the area, I suggest The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis, 2017).