City guides.

24.1 mi · ~40 min from Lake Wales

Lakeland is Polk County's biggest city and the drive Lake Wales makes for a proper night out — a chef-driven dinner, a touring band, a bookstore open past eight. Forty minutes northwest on SR-60 and the Polk Parkway puts you at Lake Mirror's 1920s promenade.

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12.2 mi · ~25 min from Lake Wales

Winter Haven is built on the Chain of Lakes — 25 interconnected lakes with canals cut between them in the 1910s. Downtown wraps around Lake Silver, Legoland sits on Lake Eloise, and Lake Howard hosts the sunset crowd on the patio at Old Man Franks.

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14.9 mi · ~25 min from Lake Wales

Haines City is what Lake Wales drivers pass through on the way to I-4, but it's quietly become one of Polk County's fastest-growing municipalities, centered on Lake Eva Community Park's pool complex and lakefront green.

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15.7 mi · ~25 min from Lake Wales

Bartow is Polk County's government seat, but the reason to drive over from Lake Wales is the streetscape: wide brick-edged avenues under live oaks and block after block of Victorian and Craftsman houses that never got scraped for a strip mall.

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16.9 mi · ~30 min from Lake Wales

Auburndale sits between Lakeland and Winter Haven on the chain of lakes that gives the corridor its name, with a small downtown on Lake Ariana and Camp Margaritaville's marina and RV resort on its southern edge.

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Home base

This is home base — the Ridge town built around Bok Tower Gardens, Spook Hill, and a Scenic Highway downtown that still runs on porch fronts and citrus-town brick. Everything else on this site radiates out from here.

Explore Lake Wales →

15.6 mi · ~22 min from Lake Wales

Lake Alfred is a small rail-line town northwest of Lake Wales, known for its antique shops, a University of Florida citrus research center, and a stretch of the Auburndale-to-Haines City rail-trail that runs through it.

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8.7 mi · ~15 min from Lake Wales

Dundee is the closest Ridge town to Bok Tower Gardens, a small lake-dotted community just north of Lake Wales on US-27 with a downtown that's more crossroads than commercial strip.

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11.3 mi · ~20 min from Lake Wales

Frostproof is a citrus town that kept its main street — a short strip of storefronts on US-27 between Lake Reedy and Lake Clinch, twenty minutes south of Lake Wales.

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5.9 mi · ~12 min from Lake Wales

Babson Park is Roger Babson's planned ridge hamlet on Crooked Lake — Webber International University, a lakeside beach, and scrub preserves twelve minutes south of downtown Lake Wales.

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