Florida at a Glance: Where Jacksonville Fits in the State

Florida is a large Southeastern and South Atlantic state shaped by water. It borders Alabama and Georgia on land, while the Gulf of Mexico lies to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Straits of Florida to the south. The Bahamas are to the southeast. About two-thirds of the state occupies a peninsula between the Gulf and the Atlantic.

That position gives Florida an unusually extensive shoreline. Its coastline measures approximately 1,350 miles, or about 2,170 kilometers, when barrier islands are not included. Florida is the only state that borders both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Those boundaries are a central part of the state’s physical identity and help explain why Florida is often understood through its coastal geography.

Florida also stands out for its size and population. The state covers 65,758 square miles, equivalent to about 170,310 square kilometers, making it the 22nd-largest state by area. With more than 23 million residents, it is the third-most populous state in the United States. As of 2020, it ranked seventh in population density among the states.

Jacksonville holds a notable place in that statewide picture: it is Florida’s most populous city. The extract does not provide a population figure for Jacksonville or describe the city’s neighborhoods, institutions or political boundaries, so this overview cannot supply those details. It does establish Jacksonville as one of the state’s principal points of reference when considering Florida’s population.

The state’s largest metropolitan area is in South Florida. The Miami metropolitan area, anchored by Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, has a population of 6.138 million. Other major population centers named in the extract include Tampa Bay, Orlando and Cape Coral, along with the state capital.

For readers following Florida from Jacksonville, the broader context is straightforward: the city is part of a state that combines a prominent northern population center with major urban areas elsewhere, a peninsula extending between two bodies of water, and one of the longest coastlines in the contiguous United States. Those basic geographic and demographic facts provide a durable starting point for understanding how Jacksonville relates to the rest of Florida.

Source and reuse information This automatically generated backgrounder adapts text from “Florida” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. The source article’s linked references are provided below where available. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/FL - https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/cph-2-1.pdf - https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/about/rdo.html - https://www.census.gov/ - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/FL - https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html Image rights Photograph description: Jacksonville, Florida skyline Creator: Matthew T Rader. License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJacksonville%2C_Florida_skyline.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.