The Cat was made by the Calusa, the people who built this island as much as lived on it. The “Shell Indians” ruled the southwest Gulf coast for more than a thousand years — a fishing people so rich in the water that they never needed to farm. They piled their discarded shells into mounds, and those mounds became the island’s high ground: Indian Hill, built of shell, still stands fifty-one feet above the sea — the highest point in all of southwest Florida. To walk Marco’s older rises is to walk on a thousand years of oyster and whelk.
When Ponce de León’s Spanish reached this coast in the early 1500s, they named the island La Isla de San Marco and met the Calusa, who fought them off; by the 1700s, war and disease had emptied the chiefdom. Centuries later the pioneers came. William T. Collier founded the village of Marco in 1870, and his son, Capt. Bill Collier, opened the Olde Marco Inn in 1896 — still serving guests today. For decades the island ran on clams and oysters, canned at Caxambas Pass and shipped north.
Why People Visit Marco Island
Marco Island rewards visitors who want wide white sand, warm shallow water, and shells underfoot, with a rare depth of history close by. Add the boat trips into the Ten Thousand Islands and the year-round Gulf sun, and the case makes itself.
