Just over half an hour away from Marco Island lies the Picayune Strand State Forest—over 74,000 acres of swamp and hardwood hammock, and one of Florida’s most impressive success stories. It’s hard to believe that it all started with a real estate flop.
A Swampy Scheme
In the 1940s and ’50s, the area was heavily logged for cypress and pine, the two most prevalent types of trees in the area and the basis for the ecosystem. Once the trees were gone, land developers presented a grand plan for the empty swamp: to build the largest subdivision in the world. They carved out miles of canals to drain the land and built a grid network of roads, which all looked great during the winter dry season. In reality, they flooded in the rainy season, and with no access to electricity, the land was essentially unlivable. The project was abandoned; Florida was just too wild to tame…