Understand Florida

Background reading for the state behind the itinerary - how St. Augustine and the Spanish colony made this the oldest European-founded city in the country, how the Everglades and the control of water reshaped the peninsula, how the railroads built Miami and the boom, and how the Keys and barrier islands gave Florida its maritime edge.

The oldest city St. Augustine, the oldest city, and Spanish Florida The United States' oldest continuously occupied European-founded city is not in New England or Virginia but on Florida's northeast coast. Spain founded St. Augustine in 1565, decades before Jamestown or Plymouth, and held Florida for most of two centuries. That deep Spanish colonial layer - forts, missions, and a Latin foundation - is where Florida's story begins. Water and land The Everglades, water, and the reshaping of the peninsula Florida is a flat, low, water-defined peninsula, and no place shows that more than the Everglades - a vast, slow-moving 'river of grass' that once covered much of the south. The twentieth-century drive to drain and control that water created modern Florida's farms and cities, and undoing some of that damage is now one of the largest ecosystem restoration efforts on Earth. Rails and the boom The railroad, Miami, and the boom Modern Florida was built on rails. In the late nineteenth century Henry Flagler pushed a railroad down the Atlantic coast and Henry Plant built another across the Gulf side, stitching hotels to track and turning frontier beaches into resorts. Flagler's line reached a tiny settlement on Biscayne Bay in 1896 and made Miami - setting off the boom-and-bust cycle that still shapes the state. Islands and the sea Islands, the Keys, and the maritime edge Florida is defined as much by its edges as its interior - a peninsula rimmed by barrier islands and trailing off into the Florida Keys, an archipelago that curves into the Gulf and Caribbean. Wrecking, fishing, lighthouses, and shelling built the island culture, and that maritime frontier still gives the Keys, Sanibel, and the Gulf islands their distinct character.