Spanish River (Florida)

Mangroves spottily fringed the stream near the Boca Raton Inlet—then unnavigable—where periodic overwash temporarily formed a brackish environment after storms.

By 1908 the Yamato Colony farmed the banks of the stream, sending crops to market, and lent the name Jap Rock to a landform near its headwaters.

During the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the draining of the Everglades opened the Hillsboro Canal; this, along the dredging of Boca Raton Inlet, led to saltwater intrusion, and consequently mangroves supplanted freshwater vegetation in the "river".

By the 1940s mangrove swamps flanked the "Spanish River", having replaced the onetime sawgrass marsh, but bits of freshwater wetland lingered into the 1970s.

[4] People joke that "no one in town can find it" but in fact the stream bed is still visible in Spanish River Park, on the barrier island alongside State Road A1A;[5] relics of the stream were also once detectable near its headwaters, west of Jap Rock (now Highland Beach),[6] and other vestiges are still evident at Gumbo Limbo Environmental Complex—formerly Boca Raton Hammock—such as the persistence of pond apples.