Away from the reef, Key Largo is a last refuge. The Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park protects one of the largest tracts of West Indian tropical hardwood hammock in the continental United States — home of the Key Largo woodrat, found nowhere else on Earth — and the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center nurses pelicans and herons back to the sky. On the bay side, the island opens onto Florida Bay and the Everglades: Key Largo is the rare town with a national park to its west and America's first undersea park to its east.
Hurricanes remain the island's oldest story — Donna in 1960 ran the Keys end to end, and storms before and since have each taken their toll — but Key Largo's pattern has always been the same: rebuild, replant, reopen. The neon motels and drive-ins of the mid-century boom gave way to dive resorts and marinas, and the island settled into what it is now: the Keys' front door, tourist-bright on the highway and wild a hundred yards off it.
Why People Visit Key Largo Florida
Key Largo is the Diving Capital of the World and the first of the Keys: the gateway island where the Overseas Highway begins, home of the first undersea park in the United States, the Christ of the Abyss beneath the reef, and the only living coral barrier reef in the continental U.S. — with the Everglades across the bay and Key West waiting down the road.
