Solving the Florida Monkey Mystery: From Tarzan to Today: How Hollywood and Nature Collide at Silver Springs and Fort De Soto
If you want the real Hollywood monkey story in Florida, look up near Silver Springs, just outside Ocala. That’s where the actual rhesus macaques from the old Tarzan films made themselves at home.
Here’s how it happened. Back in the 1930s, a film crew hauled in a bunch of macaques from Southeast Asia to turn the springs into a fake “African jungle” for the cameras. Once the monkeys landed on an island, they didn’t stick around. They swam off, disappeared into the woods, and never looked back. Now, their wild descendants swing through the trees, turning into a quirky tourist draw. The Silver Springs connection? That’s the real thing.
Fort De Soto tells a different story. People love to claim the monkeys out there are part of the original Tarzan cast, or that someone set them loose as a nod to Hollywood. But honestly, nobody knows for sure where they came from. Maybe they’re some distant relatives of the Silver Springs crew. Maybe they just showed up—the way things do in Florida. You’ll find them around Long Mullet Key, charming visitors, swiping snacks, and building up their own legend. It’s a Florida mystery, not a Hollywood screenplay.
And Florida’s monkey saga doesn’t stop there. Down by Fort Lauderdale Airport, vervet monkeys have been running wild ever since they escaped a zoo in the 1940s. Squirrel monkeys? They popped up from other oddball releases over the years. The whole state’s a patchwork jungle, but not the kind Hollywood promised.
So if you’re after the original movie monkeys, Silver Springs is your spot. The macaques at Fort De Soto have their own thing going—famous in their own way, just often mistaken for Tarzan’s old crew.
