Florida’s River of Grass begins near Orlando’s Kissimmee
The Everglades are flooded grasslands filling southern Florida’s great drainage basin. Water starts near Orlando in the Kissimmee River, spills into Lake Okeechobee, then creeps south as a shallow sheet across limestone. Seminoles call the country Pahokee, meaning Grassy Water, and people have lived around it for roughly 15,000 years.
The Calusa and Tequesta dominated the region before Spanish contact thinned their numbers. Spanish mapmakers who never saw the interior labelled it Laguna del Espíritu Santo, the Lake of the Holy Spirit. Surveyor John Gerard de Brahm wrote River Glades in 1773, Everglades appeared on an 1823 map, and a 2007 study by Ary Lamme and Raymond Oldakowski found the Glades still recognised as a distinct, thinly peopled vernacular region.
The bedrock tells a long story. Florida’s crust once belonged to the African part of Gondwana and joined North America about 300 million years ago. Layers of shell, sand, and calcium carbonate laid down between 25 and 70 million years ago formed the permeable limestone of the Floridan aquifer. Near the surface, the Miami Limestone and the Fort Thompson Formation matter most; beneath them the Biscayne Aquifer, recharged straight from Everglades water, supplies metropolitan Miami, while Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach sit on the raised Miami Rock Ridge.
When seas rose around 17,000 years ago, runoff from Lake Okeechobee slowed and the marsh spread, piling up nearly 18 feet of peat. The Kissimmee, Caloosahatchee, Miami, Myakka, and Peace rivers feed the flooding; Okeechobee itself covers 730 square miles yet averages only about 9 feet deep. Wildlife ranges from the gray ratsnake to the snail kite.
Planters proposed drainage in 1848 and digging began in 1882; twentieth-century canals fuelled South Florida’s boom while shrinking the marsh. Conservation gained ground in the 1970s, and UNESCO and the Ramsar Convention now recognise the Everglades as a wetland of global importance.
Source: Everglades
