Everglades National Park
The Everglades ecosystem once stretched across a mosaic of wetlands and subtropical wilderness from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Unfortunately, by the mid-1900s nearly half of the slow-moving “river of grass” had been drained to make way for farms and urban development. The park was established in 1947, after decades of activism, to preserve a treasured 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem.
The Everglades is a complex mix of salt and freshwater wetlands, hardwood hammocks, and pine rocklands that support a wide variety of flora and fauna. The ecosystem functions as a giant water purifier, filtering and cleaning water that drains from farms and impervious surfaces before reaching Florida Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands. The Everglades also contributes to South Florida’s climate resilience, naturally absorbing the impacts of hurricanes and minimizing coastal erosion and flooding.
Key West then onward and upward through the Gulf to
Pensacola, you’ll find thousands of miles of beaches, bays, inlets, islands and estuaries designed by nature for swimming, surfing, sunbathing, camping and exploring.
Florida s 320 known freshwater springs offer the luxury of living it up in deliciously cool comfort as you drift downstream. Locals and visitors have enjoyed these crystalline springs and rivers for decades, and so have the gentle manatees who make these waterways their winter homes and create lasting memories for the visitors who adore them.Florida is where you’ll find the third-largest concentration of nesting bald eagles in America.
John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, the first undersea park in the United States, has become a national treasure, eliciting images of the Christ of the Deep statue submerged in cerulean blue waters teeming with majestic fish.
Equally as beautiful, but often overlooked, is the history of the Key Largo park and how it was created 60 years ago and what it has evolved into today.
The park was largely conceived after Key Largo and its waters were carved out of the original plans for Everglades National Park due to opposition from Monroe County officials. Ten years after the national park was founded in 1947, a group of conservationists and Key Largo residents, led by former Miami Herald associate editor John Pennekamp Sr., renewed efforts to protect the reef.