Look at Marco from the air and you see a town laced with water — thousands of homes on navigable canals, a whole island engineered for boats. That is the work of three brothers. In the 1960s, Elliott, Robert, and Frank Mackle and their Deltona Corporation bought the island, dredged the mangroves into a grid of waterways and waterfront lots, and sold the dream of a planned island paradise to middle-class America. Marco opened to the public in 1965, drew tens of thousands to its grand opening, and a bridge soon linked it to the mainland. The quiet fishing island became one of Florida’s most sought-after addresses almost overnight.
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.
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.
