Florida Guide Florida regions, islands, and historic-city planning

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.

Last checked July 12, 2026

The river of grass

The Everglades is not a swamp but a broad, shallow sheet of freshwater that flows almost imperceptibly south from Lake Okeechobee toward Florida Bay - the 'river of grass' the writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas made famous in 1947. Its sawgrass marshes, tree islands, and mangrove coast support wading birds, alligators, and the endangered Florida panther.

Everglades National Park, established in 1947, protects the southern portion, but the historic system was far larger, once reaching from the Kissimmee River basin near Orlando down through the whole southern peninsula.

Drainage and the making of modern Florida

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and accelerating through the twentieth, engineers dug canals and built levees to drain the Everglades for farmland and to hold back floods, opening the rich soils south of Lake Okeechobee to agriculture and the coasts to cities. Alligator Alley and the Tamiami Trail cut roads straight across the wetland.

That reshaping made today's Miami, its suburbs, and the sugar fields possible, but it also cut the natural flow of water, shrank the wetland by half, and set up chronic conflicts over floods, droughts, and water quality that still define Florida politics.

Restoration and a fragile balance

Because so much of Florida's drinking water and its coastal ecosystems depend on the Everglades, federal and state agencies launched the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, one of the world's largest environmental restoration efforts, to redirect water back toward its natural path.

For a visitor, the Everglades is context for the whole peninsula: a reminder that Florida is a low, wet place engineered into habitability, and that its beaches, aquifers, and cities all sit downstream of decisions about where the water goes.

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