Florida Keys
by Staff EditorFamed for their natural beauty, tropical climate and one-of-a-kind presence in North America, the Florida Keys are a getaway for tourists looking to relax and marine enthusiasts searching for unique creatures of the sea alike.
An archipelago of about 1700 islands to the southeast of the United States, the Keys begin on the southern Florida peninsula near Miami, curve toward Key West and end in the uninhabited Dry Tortugas area. The islands in the Florida Straits portion of the Keys create Florida Bay, a waterway that divides the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico.
The Keys are divided into the Upper, Middle and Lower Keys, each of which is home to a host of islands, including Key Largo, Fiesta Key and Bahia Honda. They were only accessible by boat for many years until the turn of the 20th century, when construction began on the Overseas Railway, the first train route through the Keys.
The Overseas Railway was a useful and well-traveled route through the area for two decades until the famed Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. On September 2, 1935 one of the worst hurricanes and one of the few category five storms to make landfall on the United States pulverized the Upper Keys. Winds gusted at more than 200mph and waves swelled to more than 17 feet in height, washing over the islands and killing more than 400 people.
Among those 400 was a group of World War I veterans assigned to build bridges designed to connect highways through the keys. Housed in fragile houses in the Upper Keys, trains were dispatched to evacuate them when word of the impending hurricane spread. When the trains didn’t get there before the storm hit, more than 200 workers died, spelling end of the Overseas Railway. The damaged tracks were never repaired and the Overseas Highway (U.S. Highway 1) became the main artery linking Miami to Key West. Today U.S. Highway 1 runs the length of the Keys all the way up the eastern seaboard to Maine.
The climate of the Keys more closely resembles that of the Caribbean than the rest of Florida, though in contrast to the Caribbean’s volcanic islands, the Keys are made up of plants and animals.
Revered for their coral rock islands and partly submerged mangrove islands, the Keys are a wealth of marine vegetation and animal life. The Upper Keys are largely made up of the remains of coral reefs that solidified and became exposed as sea levels lowered. The Lower Keys are made up of sandy-type deposits of limestone produced by plants and marine creatures.
The Keys are made up of forests and wetlands and the soil goes from sand to rich decomposed leaf litter. In some places, a form of eroded coral formations called caprock covers the ground. The area is also famed for housing plant and animal species not found anywhere else in America such as the Key deer.
The major industries of the Keys are tourism and fishing, with ecotourism being a big draw thanks to divers who seek out the area’s protected waters to explore the plethora of marine life.
