Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Collier County, Florida

Photograph: Corkscrew - Lettuce Lakes.jpg by Beyond My Ken · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Collier County attraction

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary

Collier County · South Florida & the Keys

An Audubon sanctuary of about seventeen square miles, holding one of the largest remaining stands of old bald cypress in North America.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

A boardwalk two and a quarter miles long carries you through it without a foot touching the ground, and that boardwalk is the point of the place: the swamp stands in water for much of the year and there is no other honest way in. The National Audubon Society began building the first one in 1955, the year after the Corkscrew Cypress Rookery Association formed to buy the land and stop the loggers taking the last of the big trees. What they saved is a cathedral of bald cypress and pond cypress, with pine flatwoods, wet prairie and marsh around the edges of it. This was an important breeding ground for the wood stork, an endangered bird that needs falling water to concentrate fish before it can feed its young. Lettuce Lake holds the deepest standing water in the sanctuary, and the level there has been measured since 1957, which makes it one of the longer water records in south Florida. It lies east of Naples, off Immokalee Road

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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