The Caloosahatchee is the spine of all of it — the river that carried Edison's boat upstream and still defines the downtown edge, running west to San Carlos Bay and the Gulf. Around the city the subtropical landscape is its own draw: the manatees that gather in the warm water at Manatee Park each winter, the elevated boardwalks of the Six Mile Cypress Slough, and the lakes and gardens of Lakes Park, with the barrier islands just offshore. It is a working subtropical city wrapped around a historic core — the kind of place where a riverside laboratory and a cypress swamp sit a few miles apart.
Today Fort Myers is a city of nearly a hundred thousand, a snowbird and year-round hub on the Southwest Florida coast, anchored by the Edison and Ford Winter Estates and the revived River District downtown. The wider region took a hard blow when Hurricane Ian came ashore in Lee County in 2022, and the recovery has been long. The royal palms along McGregor still stand, and downtown's First Street still fills on a weekend evening.
Why People Visit Fort Myers
Fort Myers rewards travelers who want history, gardens, and the river rather than only a beach — the inventors' winter estates, the royal-palm boulevard, and a revived downtown on the Caloosahatchee. People come for the Edison and Ford estates and the City-of-Palms streetscape, for the manatees and cypress boardwalks, and for an easygoing Southwest Florida day where Gilded-Age history and subtropical nature sit side by side.
