The Tamiami Trail
The Tamiami Trail is a road that cuts across southern Florida through the Everglades. It runs from Tampa to Miami, running in a southeast direction. It also runs right through the Everglades, and the main Everglades National Park visitor centers can be found just by driving along the Tamiami Trail.
History of the Tamiami Trail
The road was built about75 years ago across swamps in the Everglades and took over ten years to complete. Dynamite was used…three million sticks of it!
Big Cypress and Everglades
To get from the western to the eastern side of the southern tip of Florida, you have to either take I-75 or the Tamiami Trail. If you drive the Trail, expect to go as slow as 35 mph in some spots, and watch out for alligators.
There are not only alligators but also panthers, hogs, deer, and otters along the Tamiami Trial in the Everglades National Park. Everglades animals are sometimes elusive but they do pop out once in a while so be careful driving.
You’ll drive right through the center of Big Cypress National Preserve when you take the Tamiami Trail. It’s a forest of a million acres, with rare orchids and other Everglades plants.
Directions to Everglades National Park
The Entrances
Everglades National Park has three entrances from land and one main entrance area with facilities from the water. These are:
- Gulf Coast Visitor Center, on the northwest tip of the Park
- Shark Valley Visitor Center, on the northern central edge of the Park
- Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, on the eastern edge of the Park
- Royal Palm Visitor Center, just a few miles inside the Homestead entrance to the Park, after Ernest Coe Visitor Center
- Big Cypress National Preserve Visitor Center, in Big Cypress National Preserve, next to Everglades National Park
- Flamingo Visitor Center, on the southern coast, accessible by water and via Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center
Each of these entrances and visitor centers offers a different angle on the Everglades, and depending on where you’re driving from, and what you plan to do, each one offers different activities as well.
Big Cypress National Preserve
lies adjacent to Everglades National Park, and is part of the same ecosystem. The Preserve itself is mostly northwest of Everglades National Park, but ecologically speaking, lay adjacent to the Park, covering the western half of the middle of the Florida peninsula south of Lake Oceechobee. In other words, what has been preserved doesn’t cover what used to be. In fact, the cypress swamps used to extend all the way up to Lake Okeechobee, with a section called Devil’s Garden that was more pineland, in the days before white settlers drained the area and began raising cattle in the northern region of the Okeechobee drainage area. The current 729,000 acres of Cypress swampland, although a fraction of the cypress swamps that existed 150 years ago, are still a vital component of today’s Everglades.