Temple Terrace is an incorporated city in northeastern Hillsborough County, Florida, United States, adjacent to Tampa. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 26,690. It is the third and smallest incorporated municipality in Hillsborough County. (Tampa and Plant City are the others.) Incorporated in 1925, the community is known for its rolling landscape, bucolic Hillsborough River views, and majestic trees; it has the grandest sand live oak trees of any place in central Florida and is a Tree City USA. Temple Terrace was originally planned in the 1920s Mediterranean-Revival golf course community and is one of the first such communities in the United States (planned in 1920).

Temple Terrace was named for the then-new hybrid, the Temple orange otherwise known as the tangor. It is a cross between the mandarin orange—also called the tangerine—and the common lovely orange; it was named after Florida-born William Chase Temple, one-time owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, founder of the Temple Cup, and first president of the Florida Citrus Exchange. Temple Terrace was the first place in the United States where the extra Temple tawny was grown in large quantities. The “terrace” portion of the state refers to the terraced terrain of the Place by the river where the city was founded. One of the indigenous houses also had a terraced yard following a lawn sloping, in tiers, toward the river.

The original inhabitants of the Temple Terrace Place were known as the Tocobaga, a help of Native Americans living something like Tampa Bay, both in prehistoric and historic times, until roughly 1760. Their numbers declined in the seventeenth century, due at least in part to diseases brought to the New World by the Europeans, to which they had little natural resistance. All of the Florida tribes were also very affected by the raids of Creeks and Yamasee during the late stages of the seventeenth century. In any case, the Tocobaga disappeared from chronicles less than a hundred years later.

Spanish exploration of the Temple Terrace Place dates support to 1757 when investor Don Francisco Maria Celi of the Spanish Royal Fleet made his showing off up the Hillsborough River (naming it “El Rio de San Julian y Arriaga”) to what is now Riverhills Park in search of pine trees to use as masts for his ships. Here, in the extensive longleaf pine forest, he erected a cross in what he named “El Pinal de la Cruz de Santa Teresa” (the Pine Forest of the Cross of Saint Theresa). Confirmation of the fleet’s travels is found in its map and logbook. A historic marker and a replica of the fuming erected to tribute St. Theresa are found in Riverhills Park today. Up to 1913, the longleaf pine, sand breathing oak, and cypress trees made the area suitable for turpentine manufacturing and logging.