Florida’s Overseas Highway skips across 42 bridges with open ocean on both sides

America’s wildest road ends at Mile Marker 0

There’s no other drive like this in the country. U.S. Route 1 leaves the Florida mainland and just keeps going, skipping from island to island across 42 bridges with open ocean on both sides.

The mile markers count down from 127 to zero, and locals use them as addresses. By the time you reach Key West, you’ve crossed the Atlantic, Florida Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico.

What happens in between is the whole point.

The railroad that became a road

Henry Flagler was 82 years old on January 22, 1912, the day his first train rolled into Key West. He spent $30 million of his own money building that railroad from the Florida mainland, starting in 1905.

About 4,000 workers hacked bridges and laid track through swamps and hurricanes for years.

Then, on Labor Day 1935, a Category 5 hurricane tore through and wiped out 40 miles of track, killing more than 400 people.

Florida bought the wreckage for $640,000, converted the rail bridges into a road, and opened the highway in 1938.

Key Largo sits at the start of something special

Key Largo is the first major island heading south and the largest in the chain.

It’s also where you’ll find John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, established in 1963 as the first undersea park in the United States. The park stretches 70 nautical square miles and runs three miles into the Atlantic.

It protects the only living coral reef in the continental United States. You can snorkel it, scuba dive it, or ride a glass-bottom boat over it if you’d rather stay dry.

An 8.5-foot Jesus stands in 25 feet of water

About a mile offshore from Key Largo, a 4,000-pound bronze statue of Jesus Christ rests on the ocean floor in 25 feet of water. His arms reach upward.

Snorkelers swim over him. Divers circle him.

The statue went in at its current spot in 1965, donated to the Underwater Society of America in 1961. It’s the third casting of the original sculpture standing in the Mediterranean near Genoa, Italy.

The two statues face each other across the Atlantic.

Islamorada: where the tarpon jump for your hand

People call Islamorada the Sport-Fishing Capital of the World, and the name goes back to Spanish explorers who called it “isla morada,” meaning purple island, for the bougainvillea and the color of the evening sky.

At Robbie’s Marina, a Keys fixture since the 1970s, wild tarpon swim up to the docks and leap out of the water to snatch bait fish from your hand.

The fish are enormous and completely free to leave whenever they want. They just don’t.

The hurricane that changed everything in 1935

Near Mile Marker 73, eight concrete bridge piers still stick up from the water, left over from a highway project that never got finished.

The workers building it were World War I veterans, and most of them died when the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 tore through. The storm was the most powerful to hit the United States up to that point.

The Florida Keys Memorial in Islamorada marks where they’re buried. Their deaths triggered a congressional investigation into how the work camps were run.

The Seven Mile Bridge, which is actually 6.79 miles

The modern Seven Mile Bridge connects Marathon in the Middle Keys to Little Duck Key, and it opened in 1982. Despite the name, it runs 6.79 miles.

Right next to it, you can still see the original 1912 railroad bridge, once called the Eighth Wonder of the World. In January 2022, a 2.2-mile section of that old bridge reopened for walkers and cyclists.

Every April, the modern bridge closes for about 2.5 hours so runners can race across it, a tradition going back to 1982.

Pigeon Key: the five-acre island that built the bridges

Pigeon Key is a five-acre island you reach by walking the old Seven Mile Bridge. During the railroad construction years from 1908 to 1912, up to 400 workers lived here.

They worked six days a week, 70 to 80 hours per week, for $1.50 a day, around the clock until the job was done. That relentless pace is how nearby Marathon got its name.

Today you can walk through the original workers’ quarters, look around the museum, and picnic or snorkel on the same ground where those men lived.

The motel owner who built a sea turtle hospital

In 1986, a motel owner named Richie Moretti started pulling injured sea turtles out of the water around Marathon and patching them up.

That improvised operation became the Turtle Hospital, now the world’s first state-licensed veterinary hospital dedicated entirely to sea turtles. Five species live in the waters around the Keys.

The hospital has treated and released more than 1,500 of them.

Tours run throughout the day and take you through the operating room and the tanks where the turtles recover.

Bahia Honda’s beaches face two different oceans

Bahia Honda State Park sits at Mile Marker 37 and covers more than 500 acres. The name means “deep bay” in Spanish, which is what the early explorers called it.

Three beaches run through the park, one facing the Atlantic and others opening toward Florida Bay. In 1992, Bahia Honda became the first Florida site to earn the number one spot on Dr. Beach’s annual best beaches list.

A nature trail climbs to the top of the old Bahia Honda railroad bridge, where you can see the park and open water in every direction.

Key deer: the tiny deer found nowhere else on earth

On Big Pine Key, white-tailed deer stand 24 to 32 inches at the shoulder and weigh between 65 and 85 pounds.

These are Key deer, the smallest subspecies of white-tailed deer in existence, and you won’t find them anywhere else in the world. By the 1940s, hunting had cut their numbers below 50.

The National Key Deer Refuge, established in 1957, brought them back to a current population of about 800.

Inside the refuge, an old limestone quarry called the Blue Hole holds some of the only fresh water in the Keys and draws alligators and wading birds.

Bike or walk 106 miles of the old railroad route

The Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail runs 106 miles from Key Largo to Key West along the same corridor Flagler’s railroad once traveled. More than 90 miles of it are paved right now, broken into segments.

The trail crosses 23 of the original Flagler railroad bridges, all on the National Register of Historic Places, and earned National Recreation Trail designation in 2004.

Some sections in the Lower Keys still use roadside bike lanes while bridges damaged in recent hurricanes get repaired.

Drive the Overseas Highway through the Florida Keys

You can pick up the Overseas Highway where U.S. Route 1 leaves the mainland south of Miami.

From there, it’s about three to four hours of driving to reach Mile Marker 0 in Key West, and that’s without stopping anywhere. The road runs through five distinct island districts, each one different from the last.

State parks, wildlife refuges, and marine sanctuaries line the whole route.

The highway stays open year-round with no tolls, so the only cost is the time it takes to stop and look around.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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