Everything in Florida Keys, by category.
6 places
Located almost 70 miles west of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico, Dry Tortugas National Park is a remote cluster of seven small islands reachable only by ferry or seaplane. Its centerpiece is Fort Jefferson, one of the nation's largest 19th-century masonry forts, surrounded by crystal-clear waters renowned for snorkeling, coral reefs, and shipwrecks. The park is also a haven for nesting seabirds and migratory birds.
This Big Pine Key refuge protects the Key deer, the world's smallest deer and a creature found nowhere else, with full-grown bucks no taller than a German shepherd. The easiest viewing is at Blue Hole, the largest freshwater pond in the Keys, where an observation deck overlooks deer, turtles, and resident alligators. Come at dawn or dusk, when the tiny deer move out to browse.
Three white-sand beaches share one narrow key here, with Calusa and Loggerhead facing the calm Gulf side and Sandspur stretching out toward the Atlantic, all of it fronting water clear enough to read the bottom from the surface. The old Bahia Honda Rail Bridge, a remnant of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad, arcs broken across the channel and frames nearly every photo people take from Calusa. The park runs daily snorkel boats out to Looe Key, a reef of elkhorn and star coral about seven miles offshore that many consider the best in the Keys.
The first undersea park in the country protects 70 nautical square miles of living coral reef off Key Largo, and the headline sight sits in 25 feet of water: Christ of the Abyss, a 9-foot bronze with arms raised toward the surface. Glass-bottom boats run for anyone staying dry, while snorkel and dive trips head out to Molasses Reef and the statue; back on shore there are mangrove kayak trails, a saltwater swimming lagoon, and short hammock walks at mile marker 102.5.
Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote in this 1851 limestone house from 1931 to 1939, turning out To Have and Have Not and the Kilimanjaro stories in the studio out back. The descendants of his six-toed cats still nap on the porches and under the furniture, dozens of them, named for old movie stars in the writer's own tradition. Wander the shuttered French Colonial rooms, find the penny Pauline pressed into the deck of the saltwater pool, and the place feels less like a museum than a house someone just stepped out of.
Smathers Beach runs a half mile along South Roosevelt Boulevard, a ribbon of imported Bahamian sand that the city trucks back in every time a storm hauls it off. The water sits calm and clear because the only living coral reef in North America breaks the swell seven miles offshore, so the shallows stay warm and easy for swimming, paddleboarding, or talking a vendor into a jet ski. It is the rare beach where you can watch the sun come up over the Atlantic and set behind the palms from the same patch of sand.
