The Florida Keys: From Miami to Key West
When to go
December to April, the dry season, with warm days, cool evenings and calm water for snorkelling. The hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November and peaks from August to October; when a storm threatens, the Keys order visitors out first, before the residents, and the one road north fills for hours. In summer it is hot and humid, with a thunderstorm most afternoons, and in the Everglades the mosquitoes are fierce from late spring to autumn.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Miami2 nights
South Beach holds hundreds of Art Deco hotels and houses of the 1920s to the 1940s, painted in pastels; in 1979 the district became the first of the twentieth century listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On Washington Avenue the Jewish Museum of Florida is housed in two restored synagogues, the older of them built in 1936 for the first Jewish congregation of Miami Beach.
- Shark Valleystop on the way
The northern gate of Everglades National Park, dedicated in 1947, the same year Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass and named the slow, shallow river of sawgrass that flows south to the sea. A paved loop of some 24 kilometres, by tram or bicycle, leads to an observation tower, with alligators lying along the canal beside it.
- Royal Palm and the Anhinga Trailstop on the way
In 1916 this hammock of royal palms became Florida’s first state park, and it was the seed of the national park. The Anhinga Trail, a short boardwalk over the water of Taylor Slough, is among the surest places to see alligators, turtles and the anhinga, a bird that swims with only its neck above water and then spreads its wings to dry.
- Key Largoone night
The first and longest island of the Keys. John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park here, opened in 1963, was the first undersea park in the United States, protecting part of the only living coral reef off the mainland of the country; out on the reef, under some eight metres of water, stands Christ of the Abyss, a bronze cast from the same mould as the statue in the sea off Genoa.
- Windley Key Fossil Reefstop on the way
An old quarry where the builders of Flagler’s railway cut fossil coral for its embankments. Its walls show the brain corals and shells of a reef that grew here some 125,000 years ago, and the stone, sold as keystone, went on to face buildings all over Florida.
- Marathon FLone night
A town in the middle of the Keys, said to be named by the men building Flagler’s railway, for whom the work here was a marathon. The Turtle Hospital, in a former motel on the highway, has treated injured sea turtles since 1986 and returns them to the sea; visits are by guided tour.
- Seven Mile Bridgestop on the way
The bridge of 1982 runs about eleven kilometres over open water from Marathon. Beside it stands the old bridge, built for Henry Flagler’s railway to Key West, which opened in 1912; after the hurricane of 1935 the line was turned into the road, and a restored stretch of it is now a path for walkers and cyclists out to Pigeon Key.
- Key West3 nights
The end of the road: US 1 begins here at Mile Zero, and the Southernmost Point buoy says Cuba is ninety miles away. Ernest Hemingway lived here in the 1930s, and his house is home to dozens of cats, many of them six-toed, descended, the museum says, from a cat given to him by a sea captain.
- Big Pine Keystop on the way
The heart of the National Key Deer Refuge, founded in 1957 for the smallest subspecies of white-tailed deer, which lives only in the lower Keys and was reduced to a few dozen animals by hunting. At the Blue Hole, an old quarry filled with fresh water, you may see the deer at the roadside and an alligator in the pond; feeding the deer is against the law.
- Bahia Honda State Parkstop on the way
Some of the best sand beaches in the Keys, beside the old Bahia Honda railway bridge. When the line became a road, the trusses were too narrow for cars, so the road was laid on top of them; two spans have since been removed so boats can pass, and from the end of the remaining span you look down on the channel.
- Islamoradaone night
The village calls itself the sportfishing capital of the world. Beside the highway stands the Florida Keys Memorial of 1937, over the ashes of those killed in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, more than four hundred people, among them First World War veterans who were building the road.
- Miamione night
Back in Miami, Little Havana is the place for the last evening: on Calle Ocho, Southwest Eighth Street, the Cubans who came after the revolution of 1959 built a neighbourhood of cafés with coffee windows on the street, and in Máximo Gómez Park the old men still play dominoes.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car, the fuel and the tolls are yours. The Overseas Highway itself is free, but Florida’s Turnpike and the expressways around Miami are cashless, read by transponder or by the plate, and the rental company adds a fee to every toll day. This route returns the car to Miami; leaving it in Key West and flying out is possible, but a one-way drop charge applies. The extras worth budgeting are the park passes for the Everglades and the state parks, paid per car, the boat out to the reef at Pennekamp, and parking in Key West, which is scarce and paid.
What to know
Three things. One: hurricanes. From June to November watch the forecast; if an evacuation is ordered for the Keys, visitors must leave first, and the only way out is the same road you came in on. Two: tolls by plate. Around Miami there are no toll booths; cameras read the plate or the SunPass, so ask the rental company how it charges, because its daily fees can cost more than the tolls. Three: the Key deer. On Big Pine Key and the islands near it the speed limit on US 1 drops to 45 miles an hour by day and 35 by night, about 72 and 56 kilometres an hour, because of the tiny deer that cross the road; the limit is strictly enforced, and cars are still the deer’s main killer.
Roads, tolls and rules
The United States drives on the right. The Overseas Highway, US 1, runs some 180 kilometres from Key Largo to Key West over 42 bridges, mostly two lanes, with few places to overtake; one accident can close it for hours. Addresses along it are given by the green mile markers, counting down from about 126 at Florida City to 0 in Key West. The road is taken slowly, with a night in Key Largo and one in Marathon on the way down and a night in Islamorada on the way back, so no day is longer than about 150 kilometres.
Travel The Florida Keys: From Miami to Key West
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.