The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens is the largest art museum in Northeast Florida, comprised of over 5,000 European and American paintings from 2100 B.C. to the 21st century, and 3 spectacular gardens, like the azalea-rich Italian Garden and the wisteria covered cypress arbor in the English Garden. The museum is home to a large collection of Meissen porcelain and is one of only three such collections in the world.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville is one of the Southeast's largest contemporary art museums, featuring 60,000 square feet of space and nearly 1,000 works of art from the 1960's to present day. The museum offers lectures and film series and classes for the whole family in its ArtExplorium Loft educational center.

The Museum of Science and History, known as MOSH, is one of Jacksonville's most popular museums. It features the world's largest single lens planetarium, the Bryan Gooding Planetarium, and many interactive exhibits, both permanent and seasonal. Exhibits include the "Currents of Time", which shows Northeast Florida's history over the past 12,000 years, and the Florida's Naturalist Center where visitors can see some of the wildlife of Northeast Florida up close.

The Alexander Brest Museum and Gallery contains one of the finest ivory collections from the 17th-19th centuries in the world and is located on the campus of Jacksonville University. It also boasts other extraordinary exhibits including Tiffany glass, the centerpiece of which is an extravagant Lily lamp dating back to 1900, a Steuben glass collection, jewelry and ceramics from the Pre-Columbian period from 3000 BC to 1500 AD, and more.

The Jacksonville Maritime Museum is dedicated to preserving and sharing Florida's maritime history through photographs, paintings, and artifacts dating back to the 1500s. The museum displays many large models of ships, such as the Mayflower, U.S. Navy destroyers, and even a German submarine from World War II.

Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. It was built while Florida was ruled by Spain, in 1672, to protect the city of St. Augustine. Over the years it was involved in the struggles between Spain, Britain, and the U.S. and changed hands many times before finally coming under U.S. control, becoming a national monument in 1924 and soon after being deactivated as a military fort.

The Kingsley Plantation is the oldest plantation house in Florida and is situated on land that was once home to Pre-Columbian Timucuan Indians and houses the remains of a Spanish mission, San Juan del Puerto. The plantation house dates back to around 1797 and had many residents, however the longest resident and most notable was slave-trader Zephaniah Kingsley and his multi-racial family, at a time when slavery was still in practice, during the early 1800s. The house, outbuildings, and over 20 slave cabins are remarkably well-preserved and therefore anthropologically and historically significant.