The economy sees repeated boom and bust cycles

LONG BEFORE Walt Disney arrived in 1963 to survey the swamp land he planned to convert into a “magic kingdom”, Floridians understood how fantasy could boost their allure. In the 1800s St Augustine was a “pitifully poor fishing village”, so it was embellished to draw visitors, says Jim Clark, a historian. The fabled fountain of youth, which the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León supposedly found here, was the creation of an industrious woman who in 1910 scattered the site with Spanish artefacts. Gasparilla, a pirate-themed festival that attracts more than 300,000 people to Tampa each year, is also an invention: José Gaspar, for whom it is named, seems not to have existed.