Miami to Fort Lauderdale: The Gold Coast Corridor

The thirty miles of Interstate Ninety-Five between Miami and Fort Lauderdale are among the most densely populated highway miles in the southern United States, a continuous urban corridor that barely pauses for trees. This strip of developed coast is the result of a simple geography: there is a narrow band of high ground between the Everglades to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and almost everything built in South Florida is built on that ridge. The Everglades begin within a mile or two of the highway.

The Tequesta people lived on Biscayne Bay when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. The Calusa, a powerful maritime culture based on the southwest coast, more or less dominated them. Both peoples had largely vanished by the middle of the eighteenth century, destroyed by disease and conflict.

The Seminole, who came south from the Creek and other nations in the eighteenth century, held most of Florida into the eighteen thirties, when three Seminole Wars, the longest and most expensive Indian wars in United States history, failed to fully remove them. The Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe both hold federal recognition and land. Fort Lauderdale is famous for spring break, which is not its most historically interesting feature.

It is named for a fort built during the Second Seminole War, for which there are no particularly romantic notes to add. The coral reef that runs along the coast here, part of the Florida Reef tract, is the only living barrier reef system in the continental United States. It has bleached severely in recent warm water events.