At the start of the tour
Welcome to Everglades National Park Main Park Road
Welcome to Everglades National Park. This tour follows the Main Park Road thirty-eight miles south, from the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center to Flamingo, on the shore of Florida Bay. Along the way we'll stop at Royal Palm, the Pinelands, an overlook above the sawgrass, a tree island, a pond full of wading birds, and a lake at the edge of the mangroves.
This is a different kind of national park. There are no mountains here. The highest point in the whole park is just eight feet above sea level. When it was established in 1947, Everglades became the first national park set aside not for its scenery, but for the life it holds. It covers about one and a half million acres, and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site.
People lived here long before any of that. The Calusa built a powerful society along this coast, with great mounds and ridges of shell. Later, the Seminole and Miccosukee made their homes in these wetlands.
Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll leave you some quiet, for the sawgrass and the sky.
Point 1 · At the stop
Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center
You're at the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, named for the man often called the Father of the Everglades.
Coe was a landscape architect from Connecticut who moved to Miami with his wife, Anna, in 1925. Exploring the glades, he was shocked to find rare birds being killed and wild orchids being carried off. In 1928 he wrote to Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, proposing a national park here, and he founded an association to push for it, almost single-handedly. Congress authorized the park in 1934. It took another thirteen years to buy the land and settle the boundaries, and President Truman dedicated the park in 1947. Coe died in 1951, at eighty-four. In 1996, this building was given his name.
Before you set off, look for the statue of a Florida panther outside. The park says it's the only statue of an animal anywhere in the Everglades. So every alligator you see today is real, even one that hasn't moved for hours. It's just soaking up the sun. Give them fifteen to twenty feet, and enjoy the tour.
History, on the way there
On the way: Royal Palm: Anhinga and Gumbo Limbo trails
Next, we're heading to Royal Palm, where two of the park's best-loved trails begin.
Long before there was a national park, there was this place. It was first surveyed in 1847, and scientists came to know it as Paradise Key: a tree island of towering live oaks and royal palms in the middle of open prairie, protected from fire by the slough that wraps around it. By the early 1900s, Henry Flagler owned much of the land nearby, and scientists began calling for the key to be saved before development reached it.
The Florida Federation of Women's Clubs took up the cause, led by May Mann Jennings. In 1916, the state granted the clubs nine hundred and sixty acres, and Mrs. Flagler matched it. Royal Palm State Park, the first state park in Florida, was dedicated on November twenty-third, 1916, along with a new road from Florida City, the Ingraham Highway. By 1921, the park had grown to about four thousand acres. The women's clubs ran it until 1947, when it became one of the original parts of Everglades National Park.
In the 1930s, young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps came to work here, building trails, planting trees and repairing storm damage. A small state park, saved by a federation of women, started the conservation effort that led to everything you'll see today.
Point 2 · At the stop
Royal Palm: Anhinga and Gumbo Limbo trails
This is Royal Palm. Two short trails start here, and they show you two different Everglades.
The first is a paved path and boardwalk, about eight-tenths of a mile round trip, over Taylor Slough, a shallow channel of fresh water moving slowly through the sawgrass. In the dry season, as the water shrinks, wildlife crowds in: alligators, turtles, fish, herons, egrets, and the bird the trail is named for, the anhinga. It's a dark waterbird with a long, thin neck. It swims with its body under water and only its head and neck showing, which is why some people call it the snakebird. Its feathers soak through, so it dives easily, and afterward it perches with its wings spread wide, back to the sun, to warm up. In spring, watch for river otters too.
The second, the Gumbo Limbo Trail, loops for under half a mile through a shaded, jungle-like hammock of gumbo limbo trees, royal palms, ferns and air plants. Look for the gumbo limbo's red, peeling bark. It earned the tree its nickname, the tourist tree. And above it all stand the royal palms that gave this place its name. Storms tend to tear off their crowns but leave the trunks standing, so they grow their leaves back, and keep growing tall.
One parking lot, two worlds, and the slow water that connects them.
History, on the way there
On the way: Pinelands Trail
Next, we're heading to the Pinelands Trail, in a forest that needs fire to survive.
In the Everglades, a few feet of height changes everything. Pine forests grow on the higher ground of the limestone ridge, and where fire has been kept out, the pines give way to hardwood hammocks. Below the ridge, the sawgrass prairies begin.
These pines are a pine rockland, one of the most endangered plant communities in the world. It takes root in exposed limestone, under a canopy of slash pine, and the plants beneath are remarkable. The pine rocklands have the greatest plant diversity of any environment in South Florida, including plants that grow nowhere else. And this park protects the largest remaining stand of pine rockland forest in South Florida.
Fire is what keeps it that way. Without it, faster-growing hardwoods would crowd in and block the light the young pines need. Many of the plants here are adapted to frequent fires. So the park sets prescribed burns, to copy the natural pattern of fire and keep the forest healthy, because in this forest a fire is not the end of the story but a part of it.
Point 3 · At the stop
Pinelands Trail
This is the Pinelands Trail, a short paved loop of about four-tenths of a mile through pines, palmettos and wildflowers. Watch your step: in a few places, roots have pushed the pavement up.
Look at the ground between the trees. This forest grows on limestone, often right at the surface. Rain turns slightly acidic as it soaks through leaves and soil, and over thousands of years that water dissolves the rock along its cracks, leaving pits called solution holes. They're common in southern Florida, and in the dry season they hold water that small animals depend on.
The tall trees are slash pine, the namesake of the pine rocklands. Their shade shelters a crowd of Caribbean plants beneath them. Many Caribbean trees first reached South Florida as seeds, carried by birds that ate their fruit.
It's a dry, open forest in a park famous for water. But the same porous limestone runs underneath all of it. The Everglades formed on top of it about five thousand years ago.
History, on the way there
On the way: Pa-hay-okee Overlook
Next, we're heading to an overlook above the open sawgrass, and the view that gave the Everglades its most famous name.
In 1947, a Miami writer named Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass. One month later, the national park was established. Douglas had come to Miami in 1915 to work for her father at the Miami Herald, and over the years she took on feminism, racial justice and conservation, long before those causes were popular.
Her book changed how people saw this place. Not a swamp waiting to be drained, but a river: water spilling south from Lake Okeechobee and flowing about a hundred miles to Florida Bay, dropping only twelve to fourteen feet the whole way. In the 1950s, as canals, levees and pump stations went in, she took on the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1970 she founded the Friends of the Everglades.
One writer who heard her speak in 1973 remembered a small woman in huge dark glasses and a floppy hat, standing in front of stone crabbers, developers and lawyers. When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and came to order. The river of grass had found its voice.
Point 4 · At the stop
Pa-hay-okee Overlook
This is the Pa-hay-okee Overlook. The name is usually translated as grassy waters, a name from the Native people who lived here. The short boardwalk, about a sixth of a mile around, leads to a raised, roofed platform looking out over the river of grass. It reopened in 2026 after a full renovation, with a new ceiling that reflects the original 1959 design.
That's sawgrass out there, and despite its name, it isn't a true grass. It's a sedge, with sharp teeth along the edges of every blade. This is marl prairie: shallow water over a thin, pale soil made by periphyton, a living mat of algae and microbes that feeds tadpoles and small fish. Marl is the most common soil along the road to Flamingo.
In the deeper channels, called sloughs, the water does move, but slowly, about a hundred feet a day. Any island of trees you can see out there is a hammock, standing only inches higher than the marsh around it.
In the fall, this prairie fills with muhly grass, blooming in clouds of delicate purple. Wet or dry, green or purple, it's easy to see why the first people to know this place named it for its water and its grass.
History, on the way there
On the way: Mahogany Hammock
Next, we're heading to Mahogany Hammock, one of the tree islands that rise out of the sawgrass.
On December sixth, 1947, President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park. He described a place with no lofty peaks seeking the sky, no mighty glaciers or rushing streams. Here, he said, is land, tranquil in its quiet beauty, serving not as the source of water, but as the last receiver of it.
That was something new. For the first time in American history, a large stretch of wilderness was protected not for its scenic value, but for the diversity of life it sustains.
Hammocks are a big part of that diversity. A hardwood hammock is a dense stand of broad-leafed trees on a rise of only a few inches. Out in the deeper marshes, the seasonal flow of water often shapes them into teardrops, if you could see them from the air. And they protect themselves. Acids from decaying plants dissolve the limestone around each island, digging a natural moat that helps keep fire out. Inside, it's shady and damp. Tropical trees like mahogany and gumbo limbo grow right beside live oak and red maple, trees a visitor from up north would know at a glance.
Point 5 · At the stop
Mahogany Hammock
This is Mahogany Hammock. The boardwalk loop, about half a mile, winds through a dense, jungle-like hardwood forest. It's home to the largest living mahogany tree in the United States.
West Indies mahogany is a favorite of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, a woodpecker that drills neat, parallel rows of holes in the bark. Later the sapsucker comes back, along with insects and hummingbirds, to drink the sap that oozes out. So if you see a mahogany with tidy rows of little holes, you know who's been here.
Look up into the branches, too. The tufts of silvery green leaves are air plants, bromeliads, in the same family as the pineapple. They need no soil. Their roots only hold on, and they take in water and nutrients through their leaves. Some catch rain in the base of their leaves, little tanks where you might find a tree frog.
Step into the shade for a few minutes and listen. A few inches of height, and a moat of dissolved stone, made room for this whole forest in the middle of the marsh.
History, on the way there
On the way: Paurotis Pond
Next, we're heading to Paurotis Pond, a nesting place for wading birds.
In the 1800s, the naturalist and artist John James Audubon wrote about South Florida's great flocks of wading birds, flying overhead toward their evening roosts in such numbers that they blocked out the light from the sun for some time.
Then came the hats. Around the turn of the twentieth century, plume feathers became a fashionable addition to women's hats, and hunting the abundant birds of the Everglades was a major source of cash in the isolated settlements here. Between the plume trade and the draining of the land, bird numbers plummeted.
In 1900, Florida banned plume hunting, and the Audubon Society hired local men as wardens to enforce it. Protecting the dwindling birds became a major reason for creating this park. The recovery has been slow. But more than three hundred sixty bird species have now been recorded here, including sixteen kinds of wading birds, and the Everglades is still one of the best places to see so many birds at once.
Point 6 · At the stop
Paurotis Pond
This is Paurotis Pond. During the nesting season, it's a rookery for many wading birds, so this is a place to watch quietly, from a distance.
One bird to look for is the wood stork, a large white wader with an unusual way of fishing. It holds its bill in the water and shuffles its feet. When a frightened fish swims away and bumps into the bill, it clamps shut within a fraction of a second, which some believe is the fastest movement of any creature in the Everglades. Wood storks were listed as endangered until 2014, when their status improved to threatened.
You may also see the white ibis, the most common wading bird in the park, probing the mud with its long, curved bill, mostly for crayfish. And if you're lucky, the very colorful roseate spoonbill.
The park asks one thing at a rookery: give the birds room. A parent that's frightened off its nest leaves its young exposed. Binoculars let you watch the whole show without anyone minding you at all.
History, on the way there
On the way: West Lake
Next, we're heading to West Lake, at the edge of the mangroves.
Toward the coast, salt starts to matter. The Everglades has two great sloughs: the broad Shark River Slough to the west, and the narrower Taylor Slough to the east, the one the Anhinga Trail crosses. Both empty into Florida Bay. Where their fresh water mixes with the tides, salt-tolerant trees take over: the mangroves.
Mangrove isn't one kind of tree. It's a name for several salt-tolerant trees that aren't closely related, all of them able to thrive on a harsh coast. Everglades National Park protects the largest continuous stand of protected mangrove forest in the western hemisphere. It's a nursery for many of the fish people catch for sport and for a living. In the dry months, wading birds gather in the mangroves to feed and nest. And in hurricane season, these forests are the first line of defense against the wind and the storm surge.
More than a third of this park is marine and estuarine water. A place most people picture as a freshwater marsh turns out to be, in large part, a coast.
Point 7 · At the stop
West Lake
This is West Lake. The boardwalk, about half a mile round trip, winds through a forest of four salt-tolerant trees to the edge of the lake: red mangrove, black mangrove, white mangrove and buttonwood.
The red mangrove is the easiest to recognize, standing on arching prop roots that hold it up, trap mud and silt from the tide, and shelter all kinds of small wildlife. The black mangrove mattered to South Florida's early pioneers. Burned in smudge pots, its wood made a thick smoke that kept the mosquitoes away.
This is also where the two great reptiles of the Everglades overlap. South Florida is the only place where American alligators and American crocodiles live side by side. Alligators are darker, with broad snouts, and prefer fresh water. Crocodiles are lighter, with a narrow, triangular snout, and live in brackish and salt water along the coast. They're shy and secretive, so a sighting is a real treat.
Small boats can launch here, with engines of six horsepower or less, and no motorboats go beyond the lake. It's a quiet doorway into the largest mangrove forest in this half of the world.
History, on the way there
On the way: Flamingo and the Guy Bradley Visitor Center
Next, we're heading to Flamingo, at the end of the road and the edge of Florida Bay.
At the end of the eighteen hundreds, this coast was still one of the last stretches east of the Mississippi to be settled. Flamingo was one of only three small communities on it, and the only way in was by boat. A naturalist who visited in 1893 described thirty-eight shacks on stilts, full of fleas and mosquitoes. He claimed he'd seen an oil lamp put out by a cloud of mosquitoes. By 1910, about fifty people lived around Flamingo and Cape Sable, and census records show that many of the African American residents had been born in the Bahamas and Jamaica. People farmed sugar cane, fished, hunted, and burned buttonwood into charcoal, which they bagged and shipped to Key West.
Some hunted birds for their plumes. Guy Bradley, who grew up in Flamingo, was hired by the Audubon Society as a warden to stop them, and he took the job seriously. In 1905, he caught a local hunter's son plume hunting for the third time. The boy's father had promised to shoot Bradley if he ever arrested his son again. When he did, the father shot and killed him. Bradley died trying to protect a bird rookery in Florida Bay. Today the visitor center at the end of this road carries his name.
Point 8 · At the stop
Flamingo and the Guy Bradley Visitor Center
This is Flamingo, the end of the road, on the shore of Florida Bay.
The pink building is the Guy Bradley Visitor Center. It went up in the 1950s under Mission 66, the park service's program to modernize the parks in time for its fiftieth anniversary, in the American Modern style of the day. The architects were Cecil Doty and Harry Keck, and the building was set up on columns to keep storm damage down. Hurricanes in 2005 destroyed the old Flamingo Lodge, and storms damaged the visitor center again in 2017. The park rebuilt it, keeping its distinctive pink color and its Miami Modern lines, and it reopened under Bradley's name in 2023. From the covered breezeway upstairs, you can look across the bay to the distant mudflats, the birds, the boats and the sunset.
Keep an eye on the water. Manatees and crocodiles both live in these waters.
That's the end of the tour. You've come thirty-eight miles, from pinewoods to sawgrass, from tree islands to mangroves, and finally to the sea, and you never climbed more than a few feet. Here, a few inches decide everything, and so does the water. Thanks for spending the day with me.