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Florence Essential Info

Overview

Florence is a city on the Central Oregon Coast. Was voted as the #1 retirement community a couple years ago.

Many of the ideas in Frank Herbert's Dune series came to him during a trip to Florence to write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.

Florence is also known as the site of the exploding whale, an incident when the Oregon State Highway Division tried to remove a beached whale by dynamite - with unintended results.

Description is available from Wikitravel under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. A list of contributors is available at the original article.

Basics

Best Time To Go

Apr-Sep

Current Time

Current Weather

45 °F

Mostly Clear

Fun Facts

  1. In 1880, a sea cave was discovered near what is now known as Florence. Sea Lion Caves is known to be the largest sea cave in the world.
  2. Florence is known as Oregon's Rhododendron capital.
  3. Some claim that the city was named after state senator A. B. Florence, who represented Lane County from 1858 to 1860, while others that Florence was named after a French vessel that was wrecked at the mouth of the Siuslaw River on February 17, 1875.
  4. In 1970, Florence was the site of a famous incident, when the highways authority used 20 cases of explosive to try and blow up a dead beached whale, with unintended consequences

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