Curious Places
The genuinely weird, overlooked, and extraordinary corners of South Florida. Rocket engines in the Everglades. Underwater hotels. A monastery shipped from Spain in 11,000 crates. The places most guides skip.
54 places
AbandonedAerojet Dade Rocket Facility
NASA tested rocket engines here in 1963. They left the rocket. It's still in the Everglades.
Dade–Collier Training and Transition Airport
A full-length commercial runway in the middle of the Everglades. More alligators than planes. No fuel, no food, no reason to be here — except that it exists.
Stiltsville
Seven houses on stilts in the middle of Biscayne Bay. No roads, no utilities, no explanation.
Neptune Memorial Reef
An underwater city off Key Biscayne where the residents are cremated remains. It's beautiful and it's exactly what it sounds like.
Coral Castle
One Latvian man spent 28 years carving a castle out of coral rock using tools no one has ever identified. He did it alone, at night, and never explained how.
Skunk Ape Research Headquarters
One man in the Everglades has spent decades tracking Florida's answer to Bigfoot. The gift shop is real. The creature may be.
Ochopee Post Office
The smallest post office in the United States fits inside a shed. It has been operating since 1953. The line moves fast.
Robbie's of Islamorada
Wild tarpon the size of small children will jump out of the water and take fish from your hand. This is encouraged.
Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower
Built in 1929 to house bats that would eat the mosquitoes. The bats flew away the first night and never came back.
The Ancient Spanish Monastery
A 12th-century Spanish monastery that William Randolph Hearst bought, had disassembled stone by stone, shipped to New York in 11,000 crates, and then abandoned. It ended up in North Miami Beach.
HistoricalThe Miami Circle
A 2,000-year-old Tequesta Indian ceremonial site discovered in 1998 when a developer tried to build condos. The condos did not get built.
AbandonedMiami Marine Stadium
The only floating stadium ever built in the United States. It has been abandoned since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and is now the world's largest outdoor graffiti gallery.
Opa-locka City Hall
A city in Miami-Dade County built entirely in Moorish Revival architecture in 1926. The mayor's office has minarets.
Jules' Undersea Lodge
The world's only underwater hotel. You scuba dive to your room. Breakfast is delivered by a diver.
Christ of the Abyss
A nine-foot bronze statue of Jesus, arms raised, standing on the ocean floor in 25 feet of water off Key Largo. He has been there since 1965.
Indian Key
A tiny island in the Florida Keys that was briefly its own county seat, got massacred by Seminoles in 1840, and has been uninhabited ever since.
The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens
A Japanese museum and garden in Delray Beach built on land donated by the last surviving member of a failed Japanese agricultural colony from 1905.
Koreshan State Historic Site
A 19th-century utopian commune whose members believed they lived on the inside of a hollow Earth. They built a beautiful settlement. They were wrong about the Earth.
Cape Romano Dome House
Five concrete domes built on stilts in the Gulf of Mexico in 1982. They were on land when they were built. The sea has been rising ever since.
USS Spiegel Grove
A 510-foot Navy ship intentionally sunk off Key Largo in 2002 to create an artificial reef. It landed upside down. A hurricane flipped it right-side up.
Mound Key Archaeological State Park
An island in Estero Bay made entirely of oyster shells, built by the Calusa people over 2,000 years. The Spanish built a mission here in 1566. Both are gone.
Monkey Jungle
A wildlife park where the monkeys roam free and the humans walk through caged tunnels. The tagline is 'Where Humans Are Caged and Monkeys Run Wild.' They mean it.
Fruit and Spice Park
A 37-acre park in Homestead where you can eat anything that falls on the ground. Five hundred varieties of fruit. Free samples. No rules about what you pick up.
The Vagabond Hotel
A 1953 MiMo motel on Biscayne Boulevard that hosted Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and the Rat Pack — and then sat abandoned for 20 years before being restored.
Cape Florida Lighthouse
The oldest standing structure in Miami-Dade County. It survived a Seminole attack in 1836 that killed the assistant keeper and left the head keeper trapped in the lantern room for hours.
The Wreck Bar
Mermaid shows through an underwater window since 1956. The Wreck Bar at the B Ocean Resort is the most South Florida thing that has ever existed.
Cap's Place Island Restaurant
Reachable only by boat. Al Capone ate here. The menu hasn't changed much.
Butterfly World
The largest butterfly park in the world, in Coconut Creek. Three million butterflies a year. You walk through them.
Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse
The most powerful lighthouse in the Western Hemisphere, built in 1907. It can be seen from 28 miles at sea. Tours run twice a year.
The African Queen
The actual boat from the 1951 Humphrey Bogart film. It lives in Key Largo. You can take a cruise on it.
Venetian Pool
Miami's most glamorous swimming hole was carved from a coral rock quarry in 1923. Esther Williams filmed here. The water is still spring-fed.
Pegasus and Dragon
A 10-story winged horse locked in combat with a fire-breathing dragon. It's the second-tallest statue in the continental United States. It's in a casino parking lot.
World Erotic Art Museum
12,000 square feet of erotic art spanning 5,000 years of human history. It's on Miami Beach. It's surprisingly serious.
The Kampong
A 9-acre tropical garden in Coconut Grove that was once the private laboratory of the man who introduced the mango to Florida.
The Wolfsonian–FIU
One man spent decades collecting the objects that shaped the modern world — propaganda posters, Art Deco furniture, industrial design, utopian architecture. Then he gave it all to FIU.
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
A Gilded Age industrialist built a 16th-century Italian villa on Biscayne Bay in 1916. He used it for two winters. It's still there.
Crandon Park Zoo Ruins
Miami once had a zoo on a barrier island. A hurricane destroyed it in 1992. The concrete enclosures are still there, slowly being eaten by the jungle.
ValuJet Flight 592 Memorial
On May 11, 1996, a DC-9 crashed into the Everglades eleven minutes after takeoff from Miami. All 110 people aboard died. The plane is still in the swamp.
Ferdinand Magellan Presidential Railcar
FDR's armored private railcar — 285,000 pounds of nickel-steel and three-inch bulletproof glass — is parked at a Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami.
Mai-Kai Restaurant
A 1956 Polynesian palace in Fort Lauderdale with tiki torches, tropical gardens, a moat, and a Polynesian revue that has run continuously for nearly 70 years.
Bonnet House Museum and Gardens
A 1920s oceanfront estate in Fort Lauderdale where an eccentric artist couple lived, painted, and collected for 60 years. The monkeys in the garden are real.
Swap Shop and Thunderbird Drive-In
A 14-screen drive-in theater, a flea market with 2,000 vendors, a carnival midway, and a classic car museum — all on the same property in Fort Lauderdale since 1963.
Dry Tortugas
A 19th-century brick fortress the size of a city block, built on a remote coral island 70 miles from Key West. It was never finished. It never fired a shot in anger.
Robert the Doll
A 1904 straw-stuffed doll in a sailor suit that Key West residents have blamed for car accidents, broken marriages, and professional failures for over a century.
Captain Tony's Saloon
Florida's oldest bar was a morgue, then an ice house, then a telegraph station. Hemingway drank here. A hanging tree grows through the roof.
Key West Cemetery
A 19-acre cemetery in the middle of Key West where the headstones read like a comedy set. One says: 'I told you I was sick.' Another: 'At least I know where he's sleeping tonight.'
Pan Am's First Office
American international aviation was born in a Key West bait shack in 1927. The building is now a celebrity's microbrewery.
Key West High Heel Shoe Drop
New Year's Eve in Key West: instead of a ball, they lower a giant red high heel shoe — with a drag queen inside it — from the roof of a bar on Duval Street.
Mel Fisher Maritime Museum
For 16 years, Mel Fisher searched for a Spanish galleon that sank in 1622 with $400 million in gold and silver. He found it. The treasure is in Key West.
Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum
Hemingway wrote 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' here. The six-toed cats that wander the property are direct descendants of his original cat. There are about 60 of them.
The Conch Republic
On April 23, 1982, Key West seceded from the United States, declared war on the federal government, surrendered, and immediately applied for foreign aid. It worked.
Truman's Little White House
Harry Truman spent 175 days of his presidency in Key West, using a converted naval quarters as his working White House. The poker table is still set up.
Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden
A one-acre jungle garden hidden in the middle of Key West, tended by a single woman for over 50 years, full of rescued parrots who will land on your shoulder.
Blue Heaven Rooster Cemetery
Key West's feral roosters are protected by city ordinance. When they die, some are buried in a small cemetery in the courtyard of a beloved restaurant.
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