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Places to go in The Everglades.

Everglades & Big Cypress, Homestead, the Ten Thousand Islands. 5 places worth the drive in this corner of Florida.

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Everglades National Park Lakes & rivers

Everglades National Park

Homestead, FL · The Everglades

Everglades National Park protects 1.5 million acres of subtropical wilderness at the southern tip of Florida, the largest such ecosystem in North America. It is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site home to manatees, wading birds, and the elusive Florida panther. Visitors can walk the famed Anhinga Trail, paddle mangrove waterways, or take an airboat-free ranger tour through the 'River of Grass.'

Biscayne National Park Lakes & rivers

Biscayne National Park

Homestead, FL · The Everglades

Just south of Miami, Biscayne is a national park you mostly explore by boat: about 95 percent of it is water, protecting the northern reaches of the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States. Snorkel or dive the Maritime Heritage Trail, a chain of six shipwrecks spanning nearly a century, or paddle the mangrove shoreline. Boca Chita Key, with its 1930s ornamental lighthouse, makes the classic day trip across the turquoise bay.

Big Cypress National Preserve Lakes & rivers

Big Cypress National Preserve

Ochopee, FL · The Everglades

Big Cypress is the wild, watery buffer that wraps the western edge of the Everglades, a vast freshwater swamp of dwarf cypress, pine islands, and sawgrass prairie just off the Tamiami Trail in Ochopee. Drive the 24-mile gravel Loop Road to spot alligators, wading birds, and the occasional river otter from your car, or wade in on a ranger-led swamp walk. The cooler dry season, December through April, brings the best wildlife and the fewest mosquitoes.

Coral Castle Attractions

Coral Castle

Homestead, FL · The Everglades

One man, Edward Leedskalnin, spent 28 years quarrying and carving more than 1,100 tons of oolite limestone here by lamplight, alone, never letting anyone watch how he moved stones heavier than a car. The result is a stone garden of the strange and the tender: a nine-ton gate balanced so finely a child can swing it open with one hand, a Polaris telescope aimed at the North Star, a heart-shaped table, and a row of rocking chairs cut from solid rock. He built it for a fiancee who left him the night before their wedding, and the whole place still reads like a quiet argument that love is worth a lifetime of stone.

Everglades Airboat Tours Attractions

Everglades Airboat Tours

Everglades City, FL · The Everglades

Out of Everglades City, an airboat trades the highway for a maze of mangrove tunnels and open sawgrass, the fan behind you pushing the flat hull across water only inches deep. Captains cut the engine where alligators sun on the banks and wading birds work the shallows, then open it up again down channels too tight and too shallow for any other boat. It is the closest you get to the Ten Thousand Islands backcountry without a paddle in your hands.