A Summer Just Outside the Gate: What's New Around Isles of Collier Preserve This Season
July 16, 2026
July 16, 2026
If you live inside The Isles of Collier Preserve, you already know the rhythm of the place. Eight miles of trail along the Cypress Waterway. A kayak launch that's quieter before nine. The Overlook Bar & Grill, the pickleball courts, the sunset walk back to the house. What you may not have noticed, especially if you were away for the hotter months last year, is how much has changed in the four-mile stretch between your front gate and 5th Avenue South. The Bayshore Arts District has quietly turned into a second amenity deck for this community, and summer 2026 is when that becomes hard to ignore.
This post is a resident's field guide to the corridor. Not a roundup of every restaurant on Bayshore. A working itinerary of what's actually new, what's dated on a calendar, and what to keep an eye on before season starts again.
For years, "Bayshore" meant a short drive to Naples Botanical Garden and not much else. That's no longer true. Restaurateur Rebecca Maddox spent the last decade turning a stretch of Haldeman Creek into what she describes as an artsy, walkable SoHo-type district, first with Three60 Market, then Celebration Park on the vacant lot across the creek, then her own wine bar Rebecca's and the members-only club The Maddox. In 2025 she leased the former Three60 Market space to the operators who launched Seventh South Waterfront there, which is worth flagging because Seventh South is the restaurant that used to sit on 7th Street South downtown. That team packed up and moved to your side of the bridge.
The change most residents haven't seen with their own eyes yet is the boardwalk. A new boardwalk completed in February connects Bayshore Drive to Sugden Regional Park and the adjacent amenities in East Naples, opening a walking route that didn't exist a year ago. If you already do the trail loop inside The Isles, the Sugden connection gives you a reason to keep going past the gate on foot or by bike instead of turning around at Thomasson.
A few other openings worth knowing by name, because generic references don't help when you're deciding where to send visiting family:
The Real Macaw is the one longtime residents will recognize. It has been on Bayshore for years and is now run by Siobhan Cleveland, who took it over from her mother. She told Naples Illustrated the neighborhood has shifted enough that there are now people with strollers, or walking their dogs at night. That's a small quote, but it tells you what a Tuesday evening on Bayshore looks like in 2026 versus 2019.
Naples Botanical Garden operates on a different calendar than the rest of Naples. Summer isn't the off-season here. It's when the programming leans into the tropical side of the collection and, importantly for anyone with grandkids visiting, when the pricing gets friendly. From June 1 through September 30, kids ages 4 to 17 get in free, and those 3 and under always do. Combined with summer hours of 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and members-only entry from 8 to 9 a.m. daily, the practical move for residents is early. Go at eight if you're a member, nine if you're not, and be back at the house before the heat matters.
Two weekends worth blocking off:
| Event | Dates | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Tasting the Tropics | June 27–28 | Fruit tastings, demos, and a plant sale that might follow you home |
| Waterlily Weekend | August 29–30 | Aquatic gardens with hundreds of emerald-hued waterlilies in bloom, including the world's largest water lilies, which can grow up to 7 feet wide |
The Garden's summer W.O.N.D.E.R. drop-in programming moves indoors on June 1, running Friday through Monday from 10 a.m. to noon, which is a small operational detail that matters if you're the household that hosts the grandkids in July. The Garden also closes Tuesdays in August and September, so plan around that.
One more note for military families or anyone with military guests: the Garden participates in Blue Star Museums, and the 2026 program runs from Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 16, through Labor Day, Monday, September 7, offering free admission to active-duty personnel and their families.
Here is the honest test of whether the Bayshore build-out matters to someone who already lives in The Isles. Can you plan a Friday evening that doesn't involve 5th Avenue, doesn't involve I-75, and doesn't feel like a compromise? As of this summer, yes.
Start at the First Friday Art Walk. The Bayshore Arts District hosts it on June 5, 2026, from 4 to 8 p.m. along Bayshore Drive. Wander the galleries, then walk across Haldeman Creek to Celebration Park for food trucks, or across the street to Rebecca's if you want a proper sit-down. Seventh South Waterfront is directly next to Celebration Park, and part of what makes the location work is that live music from Celebration Park drifts over to their patio. If you stay late, Seventh South is one of the rare Naples restaurants offering late-night bites, which is a genuinely useful thing to know when out-of-town guests are still on Eastern time.
Later in the summer, the Bayshore Arts District puts on the third annual EMBELLISHED Wearable Arts Fashion Show on August 27, 2026, from 7 to 11 p.m.. Location was still listed as TBD at last check, so watch bayshoreartsdistrict.org closer to the date.
For a slower version of the same idea, the Naples Botanical Garden runs Fogg Café during Garden hours, with members receiving a 10% discount on food and retail purchases. Morning coffee at Bean To Cup, a two-hour walk through the Garden's summer collections, lunch at Fogg, back home for the pool by early afternoon. That's a full outing that fits inside a fifteen-minute driving radius of your front gate.
The single biggest development on the horizon isn't a restaurant. It's a proposed international arts center on the 17 acres at the Bayshore base of the new boardwalk. According to Gulfshore Business, Opera Naples, Theater in the Garden, and the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation announced that an anonymous seven-figure gift was obtained to purchase this property to build an international center for the arts in Naples, designed to fill a local cultural need and honor the legacy of the globally celebrated tenor.
The scope, as reported, is not small:
The property will embrace a 900-seat state-of-the-art indoor theater, an outdoor amphitheater in a landscaped garden setting, an opera museum, The Luciano Pavarotti Foundation Opera Naples International Voice Competition and an opera-themed restaurant.
A 900-seat theater within two miles of the Isles gate is the kind of nearby cultural anchor that changes what "close to downtown" means for this community. Whether or not you're an opera person, the presence of that venue reshapes evening traffic patterns, dining demand, and eventually the character of Bayshore Drive itself.
The other project to watch is Gulf Gate Plaza, the aging center at the north end of Bayshore. Isram Realty Group's leasing agent told Gulfshore Business the company wants to redevelop it, and while there is no timeline yet, an agreement is expected in 2026. Maddox's own vision for that corner, quoted in the same piece, was that a Mercato-like thing on the corner would help everybody walk. Whether it lands there or somewhere close to it, the redevelopment of Gulf Gate is the piece that finishes the walkable-corridor picture.
The reason to pay attention to all of this as an Isles resident, not as a shopper or a tourist, is that the ground rules of your daily radius are shifting. The Isles was designed to be a self-contained community, and it still is. Eight miles of trail, the Overlook, the Isles Club, Hamilton Harbor next door. What's new is that the four-mile drive to 5th Avenue is no longer the only way out. The corridor between your gate and downtown now has its own art walk, its own late-night restaurant, its own boardwalk to a regional park, and, if the Pavarotti center gets built, its own concert hall. That's not a reason to leave the community more often. It's a reason to notice that the community effectively got larger.
If you'd like to talk through what that means for the long-term picture of living here, or you're weighing whether to make your seasonal place your permanent one, I'm around all summer. Free State Florida Homes works with residents and future residents of The Isles of Collier Preserve, and the best conversations usually start with a walk around the neighborhood. Let's Connect.
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