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Touring facts about the Florida Everglades The Florida Everglades, one of the most visited spots in the United States of America. There’s so much to cover on why people want to visit the swamp lands of Florida, so much history and interest about the 8 million acres of swampland. Let’s start at the beginning though, back a while ago around the 1800’s and 1850’s people just saw the everglades as a really big swamp, they came up with the idea to just drain the whole thing so they could plant it with sugar. They thought that if they planted the 8 million acres of swampland with sugarcane it would boost up Florida’s economy by a copious amount. They actually started doing some of this around the 1900’s around Lake Okeechobee, draining some parts, big sugar companies moved in with the permission of the government and started planting sugar canes. The climate of the area is perfect for the growth of sugar canes, actually there is more than 425,000 acres of sugar cane in the southern part of the United States of America and more than half of that is in the Everglades. So you can see the opportunity they had, but what they weren’t thinking about was what they were damaging while planting these sugarcanes and draining the land, they didn’t even grow the sugarcanes organically, they used pesticides, and the run offs for the pesticides caused a lot of damage to the ecosystem around them. Then in the 1930’s they built the Herbert Hoover Dike which would prevent flooding to the lake, but they didn’t notice while it stopped Lake Okeechobee from flooding it was cutting off water supply to the everglades at the same time, this went on for some time. It wasn’t until the 1940’s when a freelance writer called Marjory Stone man Douglas wrote a book about the everglades that people started realizing how important the precious the everglades is, the book is called The Everglades: River of Grass. It’s called River of Grass because the Everglades are actually a really slow moving river. So finally 40+ years after that president George H.W Bush signed the Everglades National Protection and Expansion act, adding 109,506 acres to the eastern part of the park. So today, the Everglades aren’t half of what it used to be before the draining act, and there’s 36 different protected species at the reserve. Today it’s one of the most visited spots around the United States of America, it’s definitely somewhere you should visit if you’re in Florida, there’s a lot to see and a lot to do. Now when you go today to the reserve, you can see a really cool show with the wildlife, the tour guides explain how the wildlife got there, how they live together, how long they live, it’s really informative and full of facts. You even get to see him open the alligator’s mouth. Another neat thing is that you could go onto an airboat and ride around the swamp lands and see the wildlife for yourself. So it really is an experience touring to the everglades, you learn a lot of history and it’s a really fun time.
Remember Miami offers a wide variety of activities and tours to the Everglades different parks, actually the leader in Miami tours is Half Price Tour Tickets, also doing the tours for the best value. You may visit the website directly at Everglades Tours and go discover the jungle on its more natural expression.
Wrote by Jean Francois a Miami tour operator for Half Price Tour Tickets,
(305) 444-0707
1657 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, Fl 33139
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