Four Hundred Miles of Water: The Canals of Cape Coral
Near Fort Myers, Florida
If you have been driving through Cape Coral for any length of time, you have crossed a canal. You have probably crossed several. The city has more than four hundred miles of navigable waterways, which makes it the most extensively canaled city in the world, surpassing Venice by a significant margin.
This was entirely deliberate. The canal system was the product, not a feature of the product. When the Rosen brothers needed waterfront lots to sell at a premium, they needed water. So they created water. Dredges chewed through palmetto flatwoods and freshwater marshes, piling the excavated material into what would become the foundations of the houses built beside the canals. The land rose as the water came in.
The system is divided into two categories. The Gulf-access canals connect, through a series of locks and passes, all the way to the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. The freshwater canals are enclosed and do not reach the Gulf. They serve as irrigation storage, stormwater management, and fishing habitat. Bass fishing in Cape Coral's freshwater canals is, by some accounts, excellent.
The environmental cost of building this system was severe. Before development, the peninsula held mangrove forest, wet prairies, cypress domes, and a functioning estuarine ecosystem that supported fish nurseries and migratory birds. The dredging eliminated most of it. Cape Coral's rapid growth in the nineteen sixties and seventies helped drive the passage of Florida's first significant wetlands protection laws, a case of the destruction arriving before the regulation.
The canals themselves became the draw they were designed to be. Today roughly two hundred thousand people live in a city whose shape was determined by a real estate marketing strategy. The ecosystem is mostly gone. The boating is outstanding.
