The lower Florida Keys

LOWER KEYS MAIN OVERVIEW

For the real Estate buyer or investor, the Lower Keys start at Mile Marker 30 or Big Pine Key (home of the Key Deer, an endangered species, sort of a miniature Virginia White-Tail).   Key deer? 

You’ll immediately become aware of them because of the radically lowered speed limit the minute you cross from Bahia Honda and Spanish Harbor Keys onto Big Pine Key, imposed to make sure you don’t run one over.

Humor aside, you really have entered a different world once you cross over that huge seven mile gap of ocean from busy Marathon and the rest of the upper and middle Keys on the famous 7-Mile Bridge. 

You have arrived in a world that is more laid back, slower-paced, more isolated in most ways, and geographically shaped differently.

• Until now you’ve been driving along the mostly northeast-to-southwest spine of each narrow Key, ocean to your left, Florida Bay or the Gulf of Mexico to your right, with neither body of water more than a few hundred feet away (or much less), for almost 100 miles

• Now, beginning at Spanish Harbor, you head north and then due west, before resuming (at Cudjoe Key) the trek towards the southwest (direction: Key West) that you’ve been traveling ever since you left Key Largo.  (Ever wonder why it’s Key West and not Key South?)

• And something else is different!  We are now crossing Keys that run more north-south than east-west.  The actual ocean and gulf are now miles away, to our south or north,  while we cross mangrove forests, wetlands, and pine barrens.

• Check out a map:  the group of islands we call the Lower Keys are obviously different enough geographically from the Upper and Middle Keys (which run east-west, and end at Marathon) to have been considered by Colonial Spain as a different group of islands altogether.  They were administered from Cuba, not from St. Augustine like the rest of Florida.

• When Spain sold Florida to the United States it did not intend to include Key West and the Lower Keys; the young (then Lt.) Admiral-to-be Perry was sent in the USS Shark (true story) to enforce the USA’s claim to the contrary.  The rest is history.