Fort Walton Beach is exclusively a year round fishing and beach choice. Its busiest time of the year is spring smash, while thousands of people flock to the Emerald Coast.
Looking at its history we come to know that prehistoric settlement of the Fort Walton Beach is recognized to the mound building "Fort Walton Culture" that grew from something like 1100~1550 AD. This civilization appeared to come about due to contact with the main Mississippian centers to the north and west. It was the complicated in the North West Florida area. The Fort Walton peoples put in to practice mass building, exhaustive agriculture, made ceramic in a variety of vessel shapes and had a hierarchical arrangement patterns that reflected additional Mississippian societies.
The earliest Europeans where step foot into is now called as Okaloosa County and the Fort Walton Beach. These areas were members of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's party, who journeyed by boat from what is now Panama City Beach, Florida in the year of 1528 to Texas "Then we set out to sea yet again, coasting towards the River of Palms. Every day our thirst and hunger increased for the reason that our supplies were giving out, as well as the water supply, for the pouches we had made from the legs of our horses soon became disintegrating and inadequate. From time to time we would enter some inlet or bay that reached very far inland, but we found them all shallow and insecure, and so we navigated through them for thirty days, meeting sometimes Indians who fished and were poor and wretched people".
The area is expressed at "Baixa de Baca" in a Spanish map dated 1566. In shortly English and French maps the region of was noted as "Baya Santa Rosa" or "Bay St. Rose". A large number of Spanish artifacts, counting a part of brigantine leather shield, are housed in the Indian Temple Mound Museum.
Opposite to popular conviction, there is no documentary proof of pirates using the part as a base of operations. Piracy was out of control in the Gulf of Mexico from pirates. Prominent raids occurred in 1683 and 1687 aligned with the Spanish fort at San Marcos de Apalachee, a 1712 raid touching Port Dauphin that is now Alabama by English pirates from Martinique. Throughout the age of Spanish and English immigration, the area of what was to turn out to be Fort Walton Beach was noted in more than a few journals but no valuable existence was established.
The financial system of Fort Walton Beach is determined by two main factors: the armed forces, and tourism. There are two key Air Force bases which margin Fort Walton Beach. One is Hurlburt Field that is home to Headquarters, AFSOC that stands for Air Force Special Operations Command, the first Special Operations Wing as well as the Joint Special Operations University. Second one is Eglin AFB that is home to the Air Force Material Command's Air Armament Center, the forty sixth test wing, and Air Combat Command's thirty third Fighter Wing. Eglin is geologically one of the main Air Force bases at 1,875 km², and therefore address to joint exercises, and missile and bomb testing.
There is propping up business in the area that benefit from the existence of the bases, as well as military contractors and the once-over industry. In Jan can be found on different websites but the minor unemployment rate is a steady feature of the home economy. The tourism business is continuing, with summer being the main season, and a smaller peak season throughout spring break and the Billy Bowlegs Pirate Festival is taken place annually.
