Everglades National Park
Miami-Dade County. Congress authorized it in 1934 and it was established in 1947, and it was the first national park created to protect a fragile living system rather than a mountain or a canyon.
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How many national parks are in Florida?
Three: Everglades, Biscayne and Dry Tortugas. The National Park Service runs eleven sites in the state in all.
The others are Big Cypress National Preserve, more than 729,000 acres of swamp next to the Everglades and home to the endangered Florida panther; two national seashores, Canaveral on the Atlantic and Gulf Islands in the Panhandle, which continues into Mississippi; Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas national monuments at St. Augustine; De Soto National Memorial in Bradenton, for Hernando de Soto's army, which landed at Tampa Bay in May 1539; and in Jacksonville, the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve and Fort Caroline National Memorial within it. Biscayne, within sight of Miami, protects coral reefs, islands and shipwrecks, and for many of its visitors it is a boating, fishing and diving park.
Where to go from here.
Biscayne National Park
Miami-Dade County. Four systems meet inside it and each depends on the next: the mangrove forest along the shoreline, the shallow water of Biscayne Bay, the northernmost Florida Keys, and the coral reef offshore.
Open the guide →Dry Tortugas National Park
Monroe County. Seven small keys break the surface: Loggerhead at sixty-four acres, Garden Key at forty-two, Bush Key at thirty, and Long, Hospital, Middle and East Keys. Some have vanished and come back with storms.
Open the guide →Canaveral National Seashore
Brevard County. Canaveral National Seashore protects nearly 58,000 acres of barrier island, open lagoon, coastal hammock and pine flatwoods, including 24 miles of undeveloped beach that provides nesting ground for several thousand protected sea turtles.
Open the guide →Gulf Islands National Seashore
Escambia County. Gulf Islands National Seashore was authorized on January 8, 1971, and covers 135,457.89 acres across Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, with a wilderness area designated separately in 1978. The Florida district is the part reached by car: six areas open to vehicles, taking in white quartz beaches, historic fortifications and nature trails.
Open the guide →Castillo de San Marcos
St. Johns County. Spain began the Castillo in 1672 and finished it in 1695, after wooden forts had burned or rotted through a century of trying. The material is coquina, a soft stone of shells bonded together, quarried at King's Quarry on Anastasia Island and ferried across Matanzas Bay.
Open the guide →Fort Matanzas National Monument
St. Johns County. Matanzas means slaughters in Spanish, and the inlet got the name in 1565 when Spanish forces under Menendez executed Jean Ribault and his shipwrecked French Huguenots there. Spain built this tower in 1742 to stop anyone using the inlet as a back way to St. Augustine, after Oglethorpe's forces had shown the weakness.
Open the guide →Fort Caroline National Memorial
Duval County. Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere landed about 200 French settlers on the St. Johns River on June 22, 1564, and built Fort Caroline, named for King Charles IX. Most were Huguenots, Protestants leaving a France that was turning on them.
Open the guide →How do you visit Everglades National Park?
By car, through one of three entrances in three different cities, which do not connect to each other inside the park: the Homestead entrance, which leads down the main park road to Flamingo on the coast; the Miami entrance at Shark Valley, with trails, an observation tower and tram tours; and the Everglades City entrance on the Gulf coast, for boat tours and the mangrove waterways.
Read the answer →How do you get to Dry Tortugas National Park?
By ferry, seaplane, private boat or a permitted charter: the park is about 70 miles west of Key West and no road or bridge reaches it.
Read the answer →Where this comes from.
- National Park Service, Florida ↗ Read September 23, 2026
More questions like this.
Where is the hiking in Florida?
The long one is the Florida National Scenic Trail, about 1,500 miles from Big Cypress National Preserve in the south to Gulf Islands National Seashore at the western end of the Panhandle.
Where are the bike trails in Florida?
The paved rail-trails, built on old railroad lines, are the long flat rides.
Are there waterfalls in Florida?
A few, and one is a real surprise in a flat state.
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