Tarpon Springs is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. The population was 23,484 at the 2010 census. Tarpon Springs has the highest percentage of Greek Americans of any city in the US. Downtown Tarpon Springs has long been a focal tapering off and is undergoing beautification.

The region, with a series of bayous feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, was first contracted by white and black farmers and fishermen going on for 1876. Some of the newly arrived visitors spotted tarpon jumping out of the waters and correspondingly named the location Tarpon Springs. The make known is said to have originated afterward a remark of Mrs. Ormond Boyer, an to the fore settler from South Carolina, and who, while standing on the shore of the Bayou and seeing fish leaping exclaimed, “See the tarpon spring!’ However, for the most part, the fish seen splashing here were mullet rather than tarpon. In 1882, Hamilton Disston, who in the previous year had purchased the house where the city of Tarpon Springs now stands, ordered the initiation of a town set sights on for the vanguard city. On February 12, 1887, Tarpon Springs became the first incorporated city in what is now Pinellas County. Less than a year later upon January 13, 1888, the Orange Belt Railway, the first railroad heritage to be built in what is now Pinellas County, arrived in the city. During this epoch the Place was developed as a wintering spot for wealthy northerners.

In the 1880s, John K. Cheyney founded the first local sponge business. The industry continued to be credited with in the 1890s. Many people from Key West and the Bahamas decided in Tarpon Springs to hook sponges and then process them. A few Greek immigrants along with arrived in this city during the 1890s to produce an effect in the sponge industry.

In 1905, John Cocoris introduced the technique of sponge diving to Tarpon Springs by recruiting divers and crew members from Greece. The first divers came from the Saronic Gulf islands of Aegina and Hydra, but they were soon outnumbered by those from the Dodecanese islands of Kalymnos, Symi and Halki. The sponge industry soon became one of the leading maritime industries in Florida and the most important business in Tarpon Springs, generating millions of dollars a year. The 1953 film Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, depicting the sponge industry, takes place and was filmed in Tarpon Springs.