Jaw-eye view of the World's Largest Alligator.

Swampy: World's Largest Alligator

Christmas, Florida

Swampy is big -- big enough to contain the gift shop, cafe, ticket counter, restrooms, and offices of Jungle Adventures, in the otherwise holiday-season-themed town of Christmas, Florida. How long exactly is Swampy? "Pretty damn long!" a manager's voice blares from the phone at the cashier's station, as employees scurry to verify Swampy's claim to be the World's Largest Alligator. One worker heads out to find an extremely long tape measure, visibly concerned about an incident when "the Channel 6 News van backed over the tail and crushed the last three or four feet."

Swampy under construction in 1989.

Swampy is a male alligator (males are larger than females) and was built in the summer of 1989 when the attraction was known as Gator Jungle. The giant reptile was the brainstorm of park owner Kobi Kagan, a globetrotting hunter-turned-conservationist who had overseen a park in Kenya with a lodge shaped like a 60-foot-long crocodile.

Hungry gators gather for the feeding show.

Gator Jungle's founding family, the Brooks, had lived in a building subsequently merged into the body of Swampy. The attraction cafe still has the Brooks' old brick fireplace, although no one currently uses Swampy as a home.

Swampy's life was almost cut short at birth when Gator Jungle/Jungle Adventures was threatened by another Florida attraction, Gatorland, which claimed that Swampy was an imitation of Gatorland's famous open-mouth gator-head gift shop entrance. Swampy's owners countered that Swampy was a full-length alligator, not a mere head, and not open-mouthed, just "grinning." The two attractions eventually came to an understanding, and visitors to Jungle Adventures now enter through the back side of Swampy's neck, not the mouth.

Jungle Adventures gators know that good eats come from the sky.

Standing inside the mouth, on Swampy's pink concrete tongue, tourists pose for gag photos like convicts in a toothy jail cell, and have a incisor-framed view of the parking lot, the Jungle Adventures sign, and the traffic out on Florida Highway 50.

Swamp boat ready for a cruise through the lagoon.

Ironically, a subsequent fire at Gatorland permanently severed its gator mouth from its gift shop, so now neither attraction has a giant gator mouth as an entrance.

Back to Swampy: a team of Jungle Adventures employees found the tape measure and ran it down Swampy's full length, digging down around the shells at the tip of the tail. Channel 6 damage was negligible. Total length: 200 feet, 1 inch!

Behind Swampy stretches the 10-acre Jungle Adventures park, providing a home for injured or abandoned monkeys, parrots, and other exotic wildlife as well as several hundred alligators. Visitors can take a guided tour on an electric boat ride through a sulfur-scented, algae-covered, gator-filled lagoon; watch a gator feeding demonstration; pet a baby alligator; and pose with a "Swampy's Cousin," a stuffed 16-foot-long maneater named Big Daddy, described by his accompanying sign as a "crocodile feared by many."

Not even a wide-angle lens can capture all 200 feet of Swampy.

Diversions resembling these can be found at several other Florida nature attractions, but Jungle Adventures says that none of them are as natural and "Real Florida" as this one -- and of course only this one has Swampy.