Laguna Beach

Laguna Beach, Florida — not to be confused with its famous California namesake — is a small, quiet beach community on the western end of Panama City Beach in Bay County. It’s one of the oldest beach settlements on this stretch of coast, a grid of narrow streets and low-slung cottages between Front Beach Road and the Gulf, and it has managed to stay what much of PCB used to be: unpolished, residential, and blissfully calm. There are no high-rise walls here, no attraction strips — just sandy lanes that dead-end at some of the same sugar-white sand and emerald water the big resorts advertise.

That’s exactly who Laguna Beach suits: families and couples who want the Panama City Beach shoreline without the Panama City Beach scene. Days are simple — walk to a neighborhood beach access in the morning, rinse off at the cottage, and make short drives for everything else. Pier Park’s shopping, dining, and the Russell-Fields Pier are about 10 minutes east; Camp Helen State Park and Lake Powell, one of Florida’s rare coastal dune lakes, are minutes west, with the 30A beach towns just beyond the Phillips Inlet bridge.

Where to Eat in Laguna Beach

The local food scene is small but genuinely local. Squidly’s Seafood is the neighborhood’s cult favorite — a takeout-only shrimp and crab boil market where you grab Gulf shrimp by the pound and eat it back at the cottage, which is exactly how Laguna Beach dinners should work. For everything else, the west-PCB stretch of Front Beach Road and Pier Park put dozens of restaurants within a 10-minute drive.

A few practical notes: beach accesses in Laguna Beach are neighborhood-scale — smaller walkovers rather than big regional lots — so parking is limited and courtesy matters on residential streets. Highway 98 traffic moves better out here than in central PCB, even in peak summer. Spring and fall are ideal, with warm Gulf water and the community at its quietest. If your perfect beach trip is a cottage, a cooler of boiled shrimp, and a beach you mostly have to yourselves, Laguna Beach, Florida is the west end’s best-kept non-secret.