Everglades City

Walk two blocks from the circle and the plan becomes obvious: straight streets, uniform lots, a civic building at the head of the axis, royal palms lining the approach. This is a designed town, dropped into a mangrove marsh in the 1920s by one man's company.

The reason was the Tamiami Trail. Building a road from Tampa to Miami across the Everglades had defeated the state, and Barron Collier put his own money behind finishing it. In return, the legislature created Collier County in 1923 and this town became its seat. The courthouse went up in 1928 for a recorded $24,563, which even then was not a fortune.

The county outgrew it. In 1962 the seat moved to Naples and the courthouse became City Hall, which it remains. Hurricane Wilma damaged it severely in 2005 and demolition was recommended; it was repaired instead, and in December 2013 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

There is no ticketed museum in the building, and you are not going to spend an hour inside. Walk the circle, look at the courthouse, and understand that the whole settlement is the artefact.

Everglades National Park's western entrance has been an open wound since 2017. Hurricane Irma destroyed the Gulf Coast Visitor Center that September; the temporary contact station that replaced it was destroyed by Hurricane Ian in 2022; for years the park's Ten Thousand Islands gateway was a trailer and a car park.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Visitor Center opened in 2026 to replace it, named for the writer whose work reframed the Everglades as a river of grass rather than a swamp to be drained. It is built high, on thick concrete seawalls, explicitly designed to survive the next storm rather than to be rebuilt after it — a roughly $47 million answer to two decades of losing buildings.

Published hours are daily, 9am to 5pm, with restrooms, exhibits, a kayak launch, picnic area and rangers on hand. Check nps.gov before you travel; a new facility's hours and services settle over the first seasons.

The park's concession-run Ten Thousand Islands boat tour departs from a dock in town rather than from the centre itself, and the departure address has moved during the rebuilding. Confirm where your boat leaves from when you book, not when you arrive.

Between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s a large part of this town ran marijuana.

The stone crab fishery was returning less, the men here knew waters no outsider could navigate, and the mangrove maze offered a thousand places to offload a mothership. They called themselves saltwater cowboys, and by contemporary accounts a nightly run could pay more than a season's crabbing.

Operation Everglades ran from 1981 to 1984. The first phase came on 7 July 1983, when federal agents blocked State Road 29 — the only road in — and worked through the town with warrants. Further phases followed. Contemporary reporting put the proportion of local adult men arrested at an extraordinary figure, and whatever the exact number, the effect on a community of a few hundred was total.

People here will talk about it, sometimes readily, more often not, and it is worth remembering that the families involved still live in these houses. It is history rather than folklore, and there are considerably better and worse ways to raise it. The relevant fact for a visitor is simply that this town's relationship with outsiders, government and the park was shaped by those years.