Oil baron Henry Flagler, who built the famous Breakers resort on Palm Beach, also built this 55-room mansion for his third wife. It's now a museum. Vacationers can tour the estate and many other historic sites (and beautiful beaches) that stretch north and south of Palm Beach along the Atlantic coast. Photo by CycleHere for VISIT FLORIDA

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Tides bring turquoise waters to the foot of the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse and Museum, built in 1860 in West Palm Beach. Visitors can climb 105 steps for a view of the surrounding nature preserve. Photo by Chris Zuppa

Florida’s Palm Beach and nearby communities have long been a favored destination of wealthy luminaries, industry power houses and high-profile politicos.

The rich and famous are likely drawn to the area’s hidden estates cloistered behind thick hedges, carefully manicured landscapes, Mediterranean-revival mansions, championship golf courses, expensive resorts, and miles and miles of high-end, high-rise condo buildings.

Palm Beach’s rich crowd first found movie fame in the 1942 screwball comedy, “The Palm Beach Story,” starring Claudette Colbert and Rudy Vallee.

The area still attracts people of means, but travelers with more modest budgets can find plenty of fun, inexpensive and perhaps some screwball adventures, too.

The name, by the way, is said to come from the trees planted by locals along the waterfront from 20,000 coconuts salvaged from the Providencia — a Spanish ship that sank off the coast in the 1880s.

Opulent hotel and home

Skip the $1,200 to $3,000-a-night room at the historic Breakers Hotel and instead take a stroll through this famous expanse in Palm Beach. Founded in 1896 by railroad legend Henry M. Flagler, the Italian Renaissance-style resort has a 200-foot-long lobby with soaring arched ceilings accented by crystal chandeliers and painted by 72 Italian artisans.

Early 20^th-century glitterati — including the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, J.P. Morgan and European notables — wined, dined and partied here. Promoters tout its “unapologetic luxury, seaside glamour and world-class service.”

If you decide to splurge, the Breakers’ ultra-exclusive Flagler Club offers marble bathrooms and a chauffeured Tesla car service.

Flagler also built a 55-room marble mansion for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, in 1902, which is now open to the public as a museum. The Gilded Age abode, named Whitehall, resembles a European palace.

Wander through the Flagler Museum for a lavish glimpse of Baroque ceilings, original furnishings, a 1,200-pipe organ, and five display cases of 20^th-century lace. Guests can try the tea service featuring Palm Beach blend tea and sandwiches, scones and sweets for $50.

In a huge Beaux Arts-style pavilion out back is Flagler’s “palace on wheels,” his personal railcar, No. 91, built in 1886. Visitors can fantasize about luxury-style train travel in the restored salon, bedroom, guest quarters and kitchen.

Gardens and lighthouses

Across Lake Worth Lagoon, in nearby West Palm Beach, monolithic sculptures stand in the jungle-like setting of the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens. Amid two acres of tropical palms are more than 100 works by artist Anne Weaver Norton, including nine large sculptures, eight in brick and one in granite.

Norton designed the gardens with Sir Peter Smithers, a British politician, diplomat, spy and gardener who was said to have inspired the fictional character James Bond.

Norton and her husband lived in the Monterey Revival style home, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

North of West Palm Beach, the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse and Museum recalls 5,000 years of local history. The lighthouse, designed by General George Meade, was first lit in 1860. Made of half a million bricks atop a brick-and-coquina foundation, it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors can climb 105 spiraling steps to the top.

Because the navigable Gulf Stream comes close to the shoreline and curves toward Europe, builders hoped a lighthouse would help prevent shipwrecks.

The museum, a former Coast Guard station, starts with the pre-settlement era and the Native Americans who left middens of shell heaps there 10,000 years before Columbus.

Located on the museum grounds is Palm Beach’s oldest existing home, a small pioneer cabin. The Tindall Pioneer Homestead is an original, cracker-style house built in 1892 by George Washington Tindall. It contains period furniture, including a pump organ and a Hoosier cabinet from the 1800s.

Nature walks, beach turtles

Resorts, golf courses, mansions, boutiques and strip malls may have transformed Florida’s original appearance, but it’s still there if you look for it.

Palm Beach County’s Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge encompasses 145,000 acres, or 226 square miles, of the northernmost remnant of the Everglades: expansive stands of sawgrass, wet prairies and sloughs.

On the Cypress Swamp Boardwalk, walkers can try to spot more than 250 species of birds, 670 species of reptiles and amphibians, 40 species of butterflies and 20 types of mammals. Considered an urban refuge, it protects the endangered and threatened American alligator, snail kite and wood stork.

Some Palm Beach County beaches are prime territory for green, loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles that come to the beaches from May to late October to dig their nests in the sand and lay their eggs. One turtle can lay up to 100 eggs; one in 1,000 hatchings survive to adulthood.

Visitors can see turtles and absorb turtle lore at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, where caring teams heal their amphibious “patients” injured by boat propellers, fishing line and nets, plastic and balloons.

One named Xander, for example, was brought to the center because he was entangled in fishing line with both back flippers broken. Once the veterinarian untangled him and performed surgery on the flippers, Xander’s wounds healed and he was released to the ocean.

Manatee season

Manatee Lagoon in West Palm Beach features a center dedicated to Florida’s “sea cows” — marine mammals that are attracted to the warm water outflows of the nearby Florida Power and Light plant, especially between November 15 and March 31, “manatee season.”

Exhibits, talks and walks provide tutorials on these gentle giants that can weigh over 3,500 pounds and be up to 12 feet long. You might see these vegetarians chomping on sea grass.

Another place to find the “real Florida” and escape the Porsches and limousine crowd is Jonathan Dickinson State Park, over 11,000 acres split by the slow-moving Loxahatchee River.

In World War II, 6,000 men trained here in top-secret Camp Murphy. Because the U.S. Army transferred the land to the state in 1947, the land was not bulldozed and flattened for development, unlike most of the Palm Beach area.

Although only two of the 1,000 Army original buildings still stand, much of the natural terrain remains. Highlights include century-old cypress trees, red mangroves, gopher tortoises, manatees, alligators, opossums, raccoons, foxes and more than 140 species of birds.

Of course, de-stressing in a beach chair, sniffing the ocean air and soaking in the sun are always favorite pastimes in Florida. Watching the sunrise and sunset paint orangey-pink-turquoise streaks across the horizon never gets old.

If you go

American Airlines has direct flights from Reagan National Airport to West Palm Beach for $127 round trip. Delta Airlines flies from Baltimore-Washington Airport through Atlanta to West Palm Beach for $262 round trip.

Washingtonians may want to rev up their “Natitude” and get a pre-season, sneak peek of their favorite baseball team, the Nationals, who start spring training in February at the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches (fan capacity 7,700). See mlb.com/nationals/spring-training.

For a visitor’s guide, lodging, events and other travel information, visit thepalmbeaches.com.

For a look at the entire state of Florida’s best tourist spots, go to VisitFlorida.com.