José Gaspar: The Real Story of Florida’s Most Famous Pirate

Each year, Tampa becomes inundated with a frenzy of pirates. It’s called the Gasparilla Pirate Invasion and the entire downtown area is magically transformed into a pirate-themed expanse. This festival is centered around the pirate José Gaspar, who terrorized shipping lanes in the early 19 th century from the deck of his ship, the Flora Blanca, and amassed over 30 million dollars in buried treasure. His dramatic death while fighting the USS Enterprise goes down in pirate history as the most sensational death of all time. But who was José Gaspar and was he a real pirate? And what is the truth behind his story?