Where do you actually walk a dog off leash in Spanish Fort? For most of the city's history, the honest answer was nowhere in particular. You walked the subdivision loop, or you loaded the dog into the car and drove out to Historic Blakeley State Park or the trails around Meaher State Park if you wanted something longer than a sidewalk. There was no single place built for the purpose.
That changed on Huckleberry Lane. Loyalty Park, the city's first dedicated off-leash dog park, held its ribbon cutting in June 2025 at 7375 Huckleberry Lane off Highway 31, tucked behind Spirit Park and the ballfields. It is easy to file this under routine municipal news, another amenity checked off a list. What the ribbon cutting actually marks is something more specific: Spanish Fort just finished stitching together a cluster of three parks along one stretch of road that, until recently, functioned as separate, disconnected pieces of city land.
A Park Named for a Reason
Spanish Fort has been building parks in a batch, and the city named all of them after civic virtues. Valor Park, the waterfront project between the battleship and Felix's restaurant, broke ground in February 2026 under Mayor Brad Bass. Spirit Park and Integrity Park sit along Huckleberry Lane. The Spanish Fort Container Park, known locally as The Fort, anchors the shopping center side of town. And Loyalty Park, the dog park, is the piece that finally closes the loop between Spirit and Integrity.
The groundbreaking for Loyalty Park happened in September 2024. Then-Mayor Michael McMillan described it to WKRG as a one and a half acre site built for both large and small dogs, with an expectation of finishing within about ninety days. The build took longer than that first estimate, landing with a formal ribbon cutting the following June, but the site that opened matches what was promised: separate off-leash areas for big and small dogs, along with amenities that go well past a fenced field. According to the East Chamber's announcement of the opening, Loyalty Park includes:
- Play structures for dogs
- Dog water fountains
- Waste disposal stations
- A paw rinse area
- Bathrooms for people
- A shaded gazebo with picnic tables and an overhead fan
The park now has its own city ordinance, No. 733-2025, which lays out the rules for use and sits alongside the ordinance for Town Center Park's pickleball courts and splash pad in the city's public ordinance records. That is a small detail, but it tells you something: this is not an informal patch of grass the city is letting people use. It is regulated park land with its own code section, built to last.
The Part That's Easy to Miss
Loyalty Park does not sit alone. It shares Huckleberry Lane with Spirit Park and with Integrity Park, which the city has been expanding to add parking, lighting, additional soccer fields, and what will be the first city-owned outdoor basketball courts. None of these three projects were announced as a single connected system. Each showed up on its own timeline, its own budget line, its own groundbreaking. But walk the distance between them and what you actually have now is a stretch of city land where a resident can park once, let the dog run at Loyalty, walk over to watch a soccer game or shoot around at Integrity, and never leave a half mile radius.
That is a different kind of amenity than a single stand alone park. A dog park by itself is a nice addition. A dog park that sits inside walking distance of a ballfield complex and an expanding sports campus is a routine, the kind of thing that changes what a Tuesday evening looks like for a family that owns a dog and has kids playing rec league soccer at the same time. Spanish Fort did not plan this as a campus on paper. It became one anyway, one park at a time.
What's Still on the Drawing Board
The virtue naming convention is not finished. Honor Park, the sixth park in the set, is still in the planning stage. The city acquired roughly 142 acres along Bay Minette Creek and Bay Minette Basin off Highway 225 through a GOMESA grant, and as of the most recent update on the city's own site, officials were still collecting resident input through a survey to decide what actually gets built there. There is no groundbreaking date yet. What exists right now is the land and the name.
This matters for anyone trying to picture where Spanish Fort's outdoor life is headed. The Huckleberry Lane cluster proves the pattern: the city buys or receives land, gives it a virtue name, and builds out amenities in phases rather than all at once. If Honor Park follows the same rhythm as Loyalty Park did, the survey phase will run for a while before a shovel goes into the ground, and the finished park that eventually opens may look different from whatever gets discussed in early planning meetings. Bay Minette Creek is a much bigger and more natural setting than a ballfield complex, so the eventual build could lean toward trails and water access rather than the courts and turf that define Integrity and Spirit.
Meanwhile, Town Center Park, at the Bass Pro Shopping Center on Bass Pro Drive, opened in August 2025 with six lighted pickleball courts, a renovated playground, a splash pad, and a large pavilion. It is not part of the Huckleberry Lane cluster geographically, but it is part of the same wave of construction, and it is worth knowing about if pickleball or a splash pad matters more to your household than an off-leash yard.
The Older Option Nobody Built
None of this replaces the two parks that predate the current wave of construction. Historic Blakeley State Park and the trail network around Meaher State Park, near the 5 Rivers Alabama's Delta Resource Center, have been the region's actual hiking option for years, and they still offer more distance and more variety in terrain than anything on Huckleberry Lane. If your dog needs a real trail rather than a fenced yard, that is still where you go. What Loyalty Park changes is not the long hike. It is the daily habit, a short drive across town instead of the longer drive out to the state parks, and the difference between an off-leash run and a leashed walk on a trail built for people first.
Spanish Fort spent the past two years building outward from a shopping center and a set of ballfields into something closer to a real park system, and it did it under names meant to sound like a civic mission statement rather than a subdivision brochure. Loyalty Park is small. What it connects is not.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in Spanish Fort, from the parks going in to the drive times that matter to your routine, that's exactly the kind of ground-level detail Bo Nichols tracks block by block. Reach out for a conversation about what's changing here and what it means for you.
