The beach dancers stop for nesting season
A weekly gathering pauses over sea turtles, Falstaff plays Carlin Park for free, and Sunday's final gets a waterfront watch party.
The beach dancers stop for nesting season
The founder of a weekly beach dance gathering in Jupiter told WPTV last Wednesday that the group is pausing its activities until further notice, following pushback from sea turtle conservationists during peak nesting season. That's the whole story, and it's enough. A recurring, well-loved, entirely harmless-seeming thing on the sand ran into the calendar, and the calendar won. It is the kind of quiet trade-off that residents here make every summer without much fanfare — the beach belongs to the people who live along it, and for a stretch of the year, some of those residents dig nests. No word yet on when, or whether, the dancing resumes.
Florida's Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday Starts Monday, July 20
Florida's annual Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday runs Monday, July 20 through Thursday, August 20, 2026 — a full month to stock up without paying sales tax. Clothing, footwear, wallets and qualifying bags priced $100 or less per item are tax-free, along with certain school supplies priced $50 or less per item and learning aids and jigsaw puzzles priced $30 or less. The biggest ticket: personal computers and certain computer accessories priced $1,500 or less qualify when purchased for noncommercial home or personal use. A few things to know before you shop: phones, video game consoles, rentals, and repairs are excluded, and purchases made at theme parks, public lodging establishments, or airports do not qualify.
A brand-new Falstaff, free, at Carlin Park
The Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival's 38th Annual Shakespeare by the Sea returns to Carlin Park's Seabreeze Amphitheater, 400 S. S.R. A1A, July 16–20 with the world premiere of FALSTAFF. The overall festival continues through July 26. Event time is listed at 6:30 to 10 p.m., and admission is free — the festival invites you to bring a beach chair, a blanket and a picnic basket. Florida's longest-running Shakespeare festival premiering a new play, outdoors, at no cost, is not a thing most towns get. Jupiter gets it every summer.
The final, on the water, with the kids in tow
Sunday, July 19 at 2 p.m., Harbourside Place Amphitheater hosts a 2026 Soccer Final Family Watch Party — the FIFA World Cup Final shown live, with food, drinks and family-friendly activities built in around it. That last part is the pitch. Watching a World Cup final at home with small children is a negotiation; watching it at an amphitheater where somebody else has planned things for them to do is a vacation. Show up early enough to stake out a spot with a clear line on the screen, and let the afternoon take care of itself.
Saturday night belongs to Neil Diamond
Abacoa Town Center brings in "Diamond Is Forever" on Saturday, July 18 at 7:30 p.m., a Neil Diamond tribute promising an evening of his greatest hits. You already know whether this is for you, and the answer is probably yes — the songs are engineered for exactly this, a warm night, a crowd of people who know every word, and the total absence of any obligation to be cool about it. Downtown Abacoa handles this kind of show well, and July in Jupiter does not offer many reasons to be outside after dark. Take one.
Broadway Chicken is coming to Jupiter
Broadway Chicken is set to open in Jupiter, and the menu is a straight read of what the fried-chicken category currently demands: crispy chicken sandwiches, hand-breaded tenders, wings, loaded fries, and a lineup of signature sauces. Hand-breaded is the phrase doing the heavy lifting there, and it's the one worth holding them to. Jupiter's appetite for this particular food group has never been in question — the line at any given counter on a Friday night settles that argument. What's still open is where this one lands and how it stacks up once it's actually frying.
The cafe that trains as well as it feeds
Big Easy Cafe by Ernie Els in Jupiter provides culinary training and workplace experience for adults with autism, through food service and community deliveries — the subject of a WPTV feature last Thursday. It's a straightforward model and an unusually durable one: the training happens inside a working kitchen, and the deliveries put people out in the community rather than tucked away in a back room. Jupiter has no shortage of lunch options. It has exactly one that doubles as a pathway into a job, which is worth remembering the next time somebody asks where to eat.
165 years of red brick
WPTV's Where's Walter segment stopped at the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse last Friday, where the station's meteorologist stood at the base and did what everyone does — admired the striking red brick tower rising above the inlet. The lighthouse offers 165 years of history and, per the segment, breathtaking views. It is the most photographed object in town and, for a certain kind of longtime resident, the most reliably ignored. There is no bad month to fix that. The tower has been standing there through every hurricane season since before anyone reading this was born, which is its own quiet argument for paying it a visit.