🇺🇸 United States · The South / Southeast
Everglades National Park protects the largest subtropical wetland in the United States: a vast 'river of grass' that flows, extremely slowly and almost imperceptibly, from central Florida toward the sea. Far from the image of a swamp, the Everglades are a mosaic of flooded prairies, mangroves, tree islands (hammocks), estuaries and coastline, an ecosystem unique in the world that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve.
It is the kingdom of alligators and crocodiles — one of the few places on the planet where both live side by side — as well as manatees, Florida panthers (endangered), snakes, turtles and an astonishing variety of water birds: herons, roseate spoonbills, ibis, ospreys and many more. That makes it one of the country's great nature and wildlife-watching destinations, easily reached from Miami.
This guide covers the essentials of the Everglades with a practical eye: the main entrances and visitor centers, the classic trails and overlooks such as the Anhinga Trail, the famous airboat rides, when to go to see more wildlife and fewer mosquitoes, and how to organize the visit. Whether for its alligators, its birds or the immensity of its landscape of water and grass, the Everglades are an unforgettable experience.
For millennia the Everglades were home to Indigenous peoples and, later, a refuge for the Seminole and Miccosukee, who held out in its swamps through the Seminole wars of the nineteenth century. Long seen as useless land to be drained for farming and cities, they were subjected to major drainage works that upset their delicate balance. The activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, with her book 'The Everglades: River of Grass' (1947), changed that view. That same year Everglades National Park was created to protect this unique ecosystem. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'sunshine state': the land with the oldest European roots in the country, with St. Augustine; home of the Timucua, the Seminoles and the Everglades, of the tourism of Miami and Orlando, of Cape Canaveral and of a vibrant Latino culture.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
What was long considered a simple swamp is in fact one of the most singular hydrological systems on the planet. The Everglades are, in essence, a broad and extremely shallow river that moves at an exceedingly slow pace from Lake Okeechobee, in central Florida, southward, until it empties into the sea through Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Its width can reach tens of kilometers and its gradient is so gentle that the water barely flows: hence the famous image of the 'river of grass'.
That flow of fresh water, fed by the seasonal rains, gives life to a mosaic of environments: flooded sawgrass prairies, tropical tree islands (hammocks), pinelands, cypress swamps and, toward the coast, extensive mangroves and brackish estuaries. That diversity of habitats supports extraordinary biodiversity, with emblematic species such as the American alligator, the American crocodile, the manatee, the Florida panther and hundreds of bird species.
The Everglades are one of the few places in the world where alligators and crocodiles live side by side, and a crucial point for migratory birds. Their ecological value led UNESCO to declare them a World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar site of wetlands of international importance. But that delicate balance depends entirely on water, and that is where the great drama of their recent history lies.
The Everglades and southern Florida were inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, among them the Calusa and the Tequesta, who drew on the wetland's wealth of fish and game. Those peoples practically disappeared after contact with Europeans, decimated by disease and colonial conflicts.
Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Seminole arrived in Florida, a people formed by the union of various Indigenous groups (mostly of Creek origin) along with people of African descent fleeing slavery. When the United States tried to push Indigenous peoples west, many Seminole and Miccosukee took refuge in the inaccessible swamps of the Everglades, from where they resisted the U.S. army in the long and costly Seminole wars. They were never fully defeated: some groups stayed in the Everglades, where their descendants — the Seminole and Miccosukee nations — live to this day and keep a strong connection with the land.
That Indigenous presence remains a living part of the region. The Miccosukee and Seminole communities, settled on the edges of the wetland along the Tamiami Trail, preserve traditions, offer cultural experiences and run some of the area's tourist activities, such as the airboat rides, maintaining their ancestral bond with the Everglades.
For much of their history, the Everglades were seen as useless, unhealthy land that had to be 'reclaimed' by draining it. From the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth, enormous canal and drainage works were undertaken to win land for agriculture (above all sugar cane) and for the growth of southern Florida's cities. Canals, dikes and floodgates were built that diverted and controlled the natural flow of the water, fragmenting and degrading the ecosystem, which began to dry out, grow saltier and lose wildlife.
Awareness of the value of the Everglades grew largely thanks to the journalist and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose influential book 'The Everglades: River of Grass', published in 1947, transformed how the wetland was seen: no longer a swamp, but a living, unique river that had to be protected. That same year, 1947, Everglades National Park was inaugurated, the first national park created in the U.S. to protect an ecosystem for its biodiversity rather than for monumental scenic beauty.
Since then, the Everglades have been the object of one of the largest environmental restoration efforts in the world, aiming to return part of its natural water flow to the wetland. The park still faces threats — reduced water, invasive species such as the Burmese python, pollution and climate change — but it remains an essential sanctuary and one of the great natural treasures of the United States, drawing travelers from around the world every year in search of its wildlife and the immensity of its 'river of grass'.
By the end of the twentieth century it was clear that the Everglades were seriously ill: decades of canal building had cut the flow of fresh water in half, water quality had degraded because of agricultural fertilizers, and wildlife — especially wading birds — had collapsed compared with historic populations. In the year 2000, the United States Congress approved the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), the largest ecosystem restoration project ever undertaken in the world, with a projected cost of more than 10.000 million dollars and a horizon of several decades.
The goal of CERP is to 'send the water back' south, partly undoing the drainage works of the twentieth century: storing water, removing barriers such as sections of the Tamiami Trail (with raised bridges that let the water run again) and restoring the natural flooding regime. It is a slow, expensive and politically complex effort, because it has to balance the needs of the wetland with those of water supply and agriculture in southern Florida.
On top of those difficulties come new threats: invasive species — above all the Burmese python, which has decimated the park's mammals — climate change and rising sea levels (which push salt water inland, over a park whose highest point barely rises a few meters), and the urban pressure of one of the fastest-growing regions in the U.S. In spite of everything, the Everglades remain an essential sanctuary and one of the great symbols of modern conservation, where every year millions of visitors can still take in the immensity of its 'river of grass'.