🇺🇸 United States · The South / Southeast
The Florida Keys are a necklace of tropical islands stretching from the southern tip of the continent down to Key West, at the doorstep of the Caribbean. Linked to one another by the spectacular Overseas Highway (US-1), a road of some 180 km that hops from island to island over 42 bridges —including the famous Seven Mile Bridge—, the Keys offer a journey of turquoise sea, golden sunsets and a relaxed, barefoot island way of life.
You travel the archipelago as a succession of stages, marked by the 'mile markers' that show your position along US-1. From north to south you find Key Largo (the gateway and diving capital, home to the first underwater park in the US), Islamorada (a mecca for sport fishing), Marathon (in the middle, with its bridges and its turtle sanctuary), Big Pine Key (refuge of the tiny Key deer) and, at the end of the road, Key West, the southernmost and most bohemian island.
This guide walks you through the essentials of the Keys with a practical eye: the drive along the Overseas Highway, diving and snorkeling on the coral reefs —the only ones in the continental United States—, the fishing, the wildlife and the towns of each key, and how to plan the route. More than a single destination, the Keys are a road to take slowly, stopping to dive, eat seafood and watch sunsets.
The Keys were inhabited by Indigenous peoples (Calusa, Tequesta) and traveled by Spanish explorers, who called them 'Los Mártires' (The Martyrs). In the 19th century they prospered on shipwreck salvage, fishing and cigars, with Key West as the great center. In the early 20th century, the magnate Henry Flagler built the Overseas Railroad, which linked the islands across the sea until a hurricane destroyed it in 1935; the current Overseas Highway was built on its route. Today the Keys are a tourist destination of nature, diving and rest. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On the seabed off the Florida Keys, sunken Spanish galleons still lie with their treasure: for centuries these reefs were a graveyard of ships that turned a handful of remote islands into one of the most prosperous —and dangerous— places in North America. But the story of the Keys begins long before the shipwrecks and the treasure hunters.
Before the Europeans arrived, the Florida Keys were part of the territory of Indigenous peoples of the southern peninsula, such as the Calusa and the Tequesta, who made use of the rich fishing in these waters and traveled between the islands by canoe. These peoples left shell middens and other traces, though most of them disappeared after contact with the Europeans, decimated by disease and conflict.
The first Spanish explorers traveled the chain of islands in the 16th century, during the expeditions that surveyed the coasts of Florida. Struck by the shape of the rocks and the reefs, or perhaps by the shipwrecks and misfortunes that happened there, the Spanish named the archipelago 'Los Mártires' (The Martyrs). The word 'cayo', which gives the islands their Spanish name, also comes from Spanish (from 'cayo', a sandy islet), later adapted into English as 'key'.
Through the colonial centuries, the Keys were a dangerous stretch for navigation, strewn with reefs that caused frequent wrecks of the galleons crossing the Straits of Florida laden with treasure. The region remained practically uninhabited by settlers, frequented only by fishermen, sailors and, occasionally, pirates, until Florida passed into the hands of the United States in 1821.
After Florida became part of the United States, the Keys began to be settled and to develop very particular economies tied to the sea. The most singular was 'wrecking': salvaging ships wrecked on the treacherous reefs. The people of the Keys —many of them arrived from the Bahamas, the so-called 'Conchs'— specialized in aiding stranded vessels and recovering their cargo, a legal and highly profitable activity that made Key West, the archipelago's main city, one of the most prosperous towns in the country in the mid-19th century.
Other activities were added to the wealth of wrecking: fishing, harvesting sea sponges and, above all in Key West, the cigar industry, driven by the arrival of Cuban tobacco workers. The building of lighthouses along the reefs, however, gradually reduced the wrecks and, in time, brought the golden age of ship salvage to an end.
While Key West flourished, the rest of the Keys remained sparsely populated, with small communities of fishermen and harvesters scattered among the islands. The lack of a land connection to the mainland kept the archipelago isolated, reachable only by sea. That would change radically in the early 20th century with one of the greatest engineering works of its time.
In the early 20th century, railroad magnate Henry Flagler conceived a colossal project: extending his Florida east coast line all the way to Key West, hopping from key to key across the sea. The work, known as the Overseas Railroad or 'Flagler's Folly', required laying track and bridges over arms of open sea in extreme conditions. It was completed in 1912 and connected the Keys with the mainland for the first time, a feat celebrated as the eighth wonder of the world in its day, which allowed travelers and goods to arrive overland.
The railroad ran for a little over two decades. The devastating Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, one of the most intense ever recorded in the US, wiped out entire stretches of track and bridges and caused hundreds of deaths, ending the service. Rather than rebuild the railroad, the state acquired the infrastructure and, on the existing route and bridges, built a road: the Overseas Highway, completed and improved over the following decades, which is the present-day US-1 running through the Keys.
The highway, with its celebrated Seven Mile Bridge and its dozens of bridges, transformed the Keys: it made them accessible by car and opened the door to mass tourism. Over the 20th century, the archipelago developed as a destination for diving, fishing and rest, keeping its relaxed island character. Today, the combination of protected coral reefs, singular nature, picturesque towns and the scenic route over the sea itself makes the Keys one of the great tourist icons of Florida and of the United States.
Over the 20th century, Key West went through several reinventions. After the decline of wrecking and of the cigar industry (which largely moved to Tampa), the city went through a severe crisis during the Great Depression, to the point of declaring bankruptcy in 1934. The arrival of the Overseas Highway and, later, the development of a naval base put it back on its feet. By mid-century, Key West was drawing writers and artists —Ernest Hemingway lived there in the 1930s and wrote part of his work on the island— and consolidated a bohemian, tolerant and festive identity that endures.
In 1982, in a celebrated gesture of protest against a border checkpoint that was blocking US-1, Key West jokingly declared independence as the 'Conch Republic', an episode still celebrated every year that sums up the island's irreverent spirit. Tourism, the LGBT-friendly atmosphere and the cruise ships turned Key West into one of the most visited destinations in southern Florida.
In parallel, the Keys became a benchmark for marine conservation. In 1963 John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park was created, the first underwater park in the US, and in 1990 the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary was declared, protecting thousands of square kilometers of reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds. The endemic wildlife, such as the Key deer, also has federal refuges. Today the Keys face the challenge of balancing intense tourism with the fragility of their ecosystems and the threat of hurricanes —like Irma, which hit the archipelago hard in 2017—, while remaining one of the most beloved destinations in the United States.