St. Andrews State Park Campground

My favorite beach in Panama City, the lagoon is beautiful!

The water is just marvelous, but sometimes the waves can become powerful.Great place if you like to surf though and a Surf Shop is located next to the beach. My boys totally enjoyed surfing!!

Wonderfully organised, with an affordable car park for the visitors and clean.

Camping can become a habit if you truly enjoy all the benefits this place has to offer.

Great place for bird watching!

Peaceful and quiet all day and night. Friendly pleasant people. Great cell service. Large pea gravel sites with steel fire pits, grills, picnic tables and a wonderful view. Price was right too.

As others have mentioned this is a very nicely maintained park. Yes, the sites are closer together than we usually prefer; but the access to the water and beach makes it bearable. Hosts keep all the sites in tip top shape. We have a kayak and did find a place to put in right from the campground as opposed to having to drive down to the boat ramp.
Reason for 4 stars - neighbors had three noisy barking dogs but that really wasn't the fault of the park.
Other than that, we truly enjoyed our visit and will come back again.

Hard to get a spot here. We had to move spots every couple days. You will have to make a reservation well in advance if you don’t want to move a lot. Nice clean spots with plenty of space between spots. The beach is about a mile down the road, also clean and beautiful.

This is one of those parks that could go either way. If you reserve a waterfront site (bay not ocean) ahead of time and go during the off season when the campground is nearly empty then it's great. If you get stuck in an interior site with no trees for privacy during the busy season then I would imagine it's pretty awful. Lucky for us we reserved ahead and got site 112 for the first week followed by 134 for the second week. Both sites offered water views and lots of surrounding trees for privacy. We also visited at the beginning of December when the park was only 1/3 full, which meant no noise and very little traffic. Aside from the sites, we enjoyed the proximity to the park beach (about 2 miles), the walking trails around the small lake, and the sunset views over the swamp. The park is large and scenic, and like all Florida state parks offers good amenities in the form of free, clean hot showers and even washers and dryers! Panama City Beach is only a few miles away which made shopping or going out to eat very convenient. While the beach is not the nicest on the panhandle, (St. Joe & St. George are nicer) the campground was nearly perfect.

We stayed at St. Andrews for two weeks over the Christmas and New Years holidays. The campsites are mostly water and electric (either 30 or 50 amp depending on the site). Most sites are back in, although there are some pull through sites. Each site has a picnic table and fire pit. The road is paved, most sites are packed gravel/sand, although a few, including the pull-throughs were paved. The real attractions are the excellent waterfront sites along the Grand Lagoon.

We were in site #102 which was right on the water (maybe 10 feet from our door!) and tucked behind a stand of palmettos that gave us lots of privacy. We were able to pull in so our windows and patio faced the water and could launch our kayak right from our patio. We could not have been happier with our spot. And unlike many parks that have just a few prime sites, I don’t think you could have gone wrong with any of the many waterfront sites at St. Andrews. Throughout the park, most sites have good separation and vegetation between sites for privacy – although the inner sites were more open and closer together.

The campground is divided into two loops, Pine and Lagoon, both have bathhouses with free hot showers and laundry facilities. Bathhouses were well maintained and cleaned daily. Each loop also has a dump station. There is a small interpretive center at the camp office, a camp store, a public boat ramp, boat rentals and a shuttle to Shell Island (seasonal), a playground, and community campfire circle.

You really should not be bored at St. Andrews! There are plenty of spots for fishing – two piers, several rock jetties, the beach or just throw in a line from your campsite. Opportunities for water sports abound - a shallow, protected area for swimming, snorkeling around the rock jetties, kayaking across the channel to Shell Island or in the protected waters of the Grand Lagoon. We walked miles beachcombing, birding, and exploring the nature trails. For bicyclists, a 20 minute drive will get you to Gayle’s Trails, a paved bike trail which connects to the excellent Conservation Park (highly recommended) that offers about 25 miles of gravel/sand trails and 1.3 miles of boardwalk for walking and biking.

If you are visiting in the off season save yourself a good deal of frustration and call to make sure that restaurants and small businesses are open. Yelp and other on-line resources did not have accurate information on seasonal closures.

We had 4-5 bars of Verizon 4G unboosted.

Many of the campsites at this park are on the lagoon with beautiful water views. We had site 2 and I think it's the best site in the park. It was very spacious with lots of privacy. One morning I was able to catch an amazing sunrise from our site. It's a short bike ride over to the beach where we saw beautiful sunsets. Gator Lake trail is a very nice, short walking trail. We didn't see any gators though. There is a shuttle boat to Shell Island, but it's not running at this time of the year. Bathrooms are clean and there are a couple of nice playgrounds for kids, as well as a nice fishing pier. Verizon coverage was very good.

Perfect location. Beautiful serene beaches. Gorgeous sunsets. This is a big park. The sites are widely varied. If you are unable to make a preview visit, be sure and look at the site pictures on the the reservations page. Some say they are large, but there are lots of trees making entrance tight. Just because you have a lagoon-side site, many have a marsh between the site and the lagoon. I found the roads very tight for my 35' MH. Be sure and unhook your toad in the visitor center parking lot before you go into the campground. No sewer connections, but the water and elec were good. The bathhouses looked like they are new or recently remodeled. The beach is long, clean and without commercializations. All that said, this is THE place to stay if you go to PCB.