For its first decades Key West got rich off disaster. Ships ran aground on the coral reef offshore with such regularity that salvaging the wrecks — "wrecking" — became a licensed, court-supervised industry, and the men who hauled cargo off the reefs made the town, by the 1830s, the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. Salt ponds, sponging, and sea-turtling followed. Those fortunes built the first grand houses of Old Town and gave Key West a worldly, seafaring character it never lost.
Cuba was always close, and in 1868 the cigar industry crossed the Straits. Cuban makers brought their trade to Key West, and for a generation the island was a cigar capital, its factories turning out millions of hand-rolled cigars and its streets filling with a Cuban community whose San Carlos Institute still stands on Duval Street as "La Casa Cuba." A great fire in 1886 and years of labor trouble eventually sent much of the industry north to Ybor City in Tampa, but the Cuban-American heritage stayed rooted on the island.
Why People Visit Key West
Key West rewards travelers who want history, water, and a freewheeling island culture rather than only a beach — the Southernmost Point, the Conch Republic, the literary and presidential houses, and a compact Old Town you can walk end to end. People come for the sunset at Mallory Square and the bars of Duval, for the Hemingway and Truman landmarks and the wrecking-era treasure, and for an easygoing day at Mile Marker 0 where the Overseas Highway, and the country, finally run out of road.
