South Florida Explorer

NASA tested rocket engines here in 1963. They left the rocket. It's still in the Everglades.

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.

Seven houses on stilts in the middle of Biscayne Bay. No roads, no utilities, no explanation.

Miami Beach Free Water Taxi covers Biscayne Bay routes

An underwater city off Key Biscayne where the residents are cremated remains. It's beautiful and it's exactly what it sounds like.

Dive charters depart from Key Biscayne marina year-round

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.

One man in the Everglades has spent decades tracking Florida's answer to Bigfoot. The gift shop is real. The creature may be.

The smallest post office in the United States fits inside a shed. It has been operating since 1953. The line moves fast.

Wild tarpon the size of small children will jump out of the water and take fish from your hand. This is encouraged.

Built in 1929 to house bats that would eat the mosquitoes. The bats flew away the first night and never came back.

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.

Reachable via Miami-Dade Transit Route 3 from downtown

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.

Free Metromover stops at Brickell City Centre — 3-min walk

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.

Miami Beach Free Water Taxi stops at Virginia Key

A city in Miami-Dade County built entirely in Moorish Revival architecture in 1926. The mayor's office has minarets.

The world's only underwater hotel. You scuba dive to your room. Breakfast is delivered by a diver.

Jules' Undersea Lodge arranges dive-in access from Key Largo

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.

Dive charters depart from John Pennekamp State Park marina

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Metrobus Route 102 runs to Key Biscayne

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.

Reachable only by boat. Al Capone ate here. The menu hasn't changed much.

The largest butterfly park in the world, in Coconut Creek. Three million butterflies a year. You walk through them.

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 actual boat from the 1951 Humphrey Bogart film. It lives in Key Largo. You can take a cruise on it.

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.

Metrobus Route 40 stops at Coral Gables City Hall — 5-min walk

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.

12,000 square feet of erotic art spanning 5,000 years of human history. It's on Miami Beach. It's surprisingly serious.

A 9-acre tropical garden in Coconut Grove that was once the private laboratory of the man who introduced the mango to Florida.

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.

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.

Metrobus Route 48 stops directly at Vizcaya

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.

Metrobus Route 102 runs to Key Biscayne from Brickell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yankee Freedom III ferry departs Key West daily at 8am

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.

Key West Free Duval Loop Bus stops at Bertha St

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.

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.'

Key West Free Duval Loop Bus stops at Angela St — 1 block

American international aviation was born in a Key West bait shack in 1927. The building is now a celebrity's microbrewery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.