Just inland from the lighthouse at Ponce Inlet, Green Mound is one of the largest pre-Columbian shell middens left in North America: a 30-foot-high mound built up over more than two thousand years by the Timucua people from the discarded shells of oysters, clams, and conches. It is several hundred feet across and was once even larger before nineteenth-century shell-road builders quarried it for paving material.
The site is now a Florida State Archaeological Site, fenced and protected but visible from the road. Look for the small pullout on Green Mound Road and a short interpretive sign. The mound itself is not climbable, but the surrounding maritime hammock of live oaks and cabbage palms is a good reminder of what the whole Florida coast looked like before development.