Everglades National Park

The Everglades is a vast, shallow river of sawgrass creeping across the flat tip of Florida to the sea, a subtropical wilderness unlike anywhere else in the country. Home to alligators and rare crocodiles, manatees, panthers and clouds of wading birds, laced with mangroves and cypress, it is a UNESCO site and a fragile natural treasure.

Background

The park covers 1,508,976 acres in Dade, Monroe and Collier counties and protects the southern twenty percent of the Everglades as they once were. Only Death Valley and Yellowstone are larger among national parks in the contiguous United States. It was established in 1934 and dedicated in 1947, the first national park set up to protect a fragile ecosystem. UNESCO declared a biosphere reserve here in 1976 and made it a World Heritage Site in 1979, and it joined the Ramsar list in 1987. Water creeps 0.25 miles per day from Lake Okeechobee southwest to Florida Bay. The park holds the Western Hemisphere's largest mangrove ecosystem, along with 350 species of birds and 300 species of fish.

Source: Wikipedia, "Everglades National Park"

The landscape

• The Anhinga Trail - the boardwalk teeming with alligators, birds and turtles.
• Airboat and canoe - exploring the sawgrass and mangrove waterways.
• Wading birds - herons, egrets, spoonbills and the great winter bird gatherings.
• Shark Valley - the tram and cycle loop with its observation tower over the grass.

When to go

The dry winter season from December to April, when wildlife concentrates around the shrinking water and mosquitoes are bearable; the summer wet season is hot, buggy and stormy.

Things to know

In the summer wet season the mosquitoes are ferocious and wildlife disperses, so winter is really the only comfortable time. It is flat and subtle rather than dramatic, so its magic is the wildlife and the sense of wilderness. Airboats are noisy and best chosen carefully for wildlife impact.

Nearby

Miami and the Florida Keys are close; Big Cypress and the Gulf coast spread west.

Key facts