It is believed to mean sticks of fire in the language of the Calusa, an indigenous tribe that once lived in the south of the area. This may be related to the high concentration of lightning that falls each year in west-central Florida during the summer months. The term Tampa Bay is often used as an abbreviation to refer to all or part of the Tampa Bay area, which comprises many towns and cities in several counties surrounding the large body of water. Local marketing and brand promotion efforts (including various professional sports teams, tourist offices, and chambers of commerce) often use the nickname Tampa Bay, encouraging the misconception that it is the name of a particular municipality when this that's not the case.
Spanish explorer Ponce de León first arrived in the Tampa Bay Area in 1513, but the Spanish focused their attention on settling in East Florida and leaving western areas alone. In 1824, just two months after the arrival of the first American colonist, four U.S. military companies established Fort Brooke to protect the strategic port of Tampa Bay. No one is sure if Tanpa is geographically the same as Tampa because the first mapmakers moved the locations of present-day Tampa Bay (the body of water) and Charlotte Harbor, eliminated one or both, or added one or more additional bays and inlets along Florida's Gulf Coast. In the late 1880s, phosphate was also discovered in Central Florida and Tampa's first cigar factories opened, and Tampa quickly became the main shipping point for these and other commodities.
When Tampa began to grow in the mid-19th century, the roads that crossed central Florida were still just uneven trails and the railroad lines still didn't extend across the Florida Peninsula, so the most convenient way to travel to and from the area was by sea. The city's cultural institutions include the Florida Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the Ybor City State Museum (which chronicles the history of the area's tobacco industry). Over the following decades, more bridges crossed Tampa Bay, making travel between surrounding communities much faster and promoting the economic development of the Bay Area of Tampa. Tampa's explosive growth in the mid-1880s coincided with the decline in the use of Tampa Bay as a regional identifier.
In addition, any supposed translation that posits an association with some feature of the estuary that is now known as Tampa Bay must be considered suspicious. Even though “Tampa” became the official name of the city (and later the city), the area kept the name Tampa Bay. Plant extensively developed port facilities and promoted tourism, building the luxurious Moorish-style Tampa Bay hotel in 1891. Fort Brooke spawned Tampa on the northeast coast, Fort Harrison (a minor military post on the west coast of Florida) spawned Clearwater, the trading post of Braden's Town became Bradenton in the south, and St. Today, the area is home to about 4 million residents, making Tampa Bay a widely used commercial and recreational waterway and subjecting it to increasing amounts of pollutants from industry, agriculture, wastewater and surface runoff. Therefore, local, state and federal interests combined with private enterprise to create what would become the modern port of Tampa Bay.
Tampa Bay was designated as an estuary of national importance by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1990. The bottom of Tampa Bay is silty and sandy, with an average water depth of only about 12 feet (3.7 m). Tampa is also home to two professional sports teams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers National Football League and the Tampa Bay Lightning National Hockey League.
