The Florida Keys are the gateway to the Caribbean. They belong to the United States, and the chain begins where the North American mainland ends, south of Miami — a 120-mile arc of islands curving southwest into warm, shallow water, closer in feel to the tropics than to the continent they are attached to. This is where the road runs out and the islands begin.
The archipelago is made of roughly 1,700 islands, of which only a few dozen are inhabited. They are strung together by the Overseas Highway, a single road carried across the sea on a series of bridges — the most famous of which is the Seven Mile Bridge (6.79 miles, in reality). Driving it is the defining experience of the Keys: land, then water, then land again, repeated for two hours until there is nowhere further to go.
It is a drive best taken with the windows down. The Atlantic runs along one side and the Gulf of Mexico along the other, but the air between them is pure Caribbean — warm, salt-heavy, and open, with water close enough on both flanks to feel like you are travelling across the sea rather than over it. The road simply keeps going south, island after island, until it sets you down at its end: Key West.
That endpoint is Key West, the southernmost city in the continental United States, closer to Havana than to Miami. It marks the terminus of the highway and the final island in the chain accessible by road, though the archipelago itself continues westward to the remote Dry Tortugas, roughly 70 miles further out. Key West carries a culture shaped as much by the Caribbean and the Gulf as by the country it belongs to.
Video of "The Florida Keys, The Overseas Highway, & Key West"
