Orlando beyond the parks: lakes and art

Lake Eola Park, an artificial lake in the middle of the city center, is skirted in a walk of about an hour, among white swans resident for decades and swan-shaped pedal boats for rent.

The Orlando Museum of Art, opened in 1924, displays African art, contemporary American art and pre-Columbian civilizations in an Art Deco building among the oldest in the city.

Harry P. Leu Gardens, some fifty acres of botanical gardens overlooking a lake, house one of the largest collections of camellias in the eastern United States, plus an early twentieth-century house museum.

The Winter Park district, a satellite town annexed to the periphery of Orlando, offers art galleries, a boat tour among the channels of connected lakes and the Tiffany mosaics of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum.

Those coming to Orlando only for the roller coasters hardly imagine swans gifted from Rotterdam or Tiffany stained glass in a satellite museum: the city holds its own outside the theme parks.

Lake Eola, right in the middle of all this, remains the point where the two Orlandos — that of tourists and that of residents — end up crossing paths.