Key West
At the end of US-1, where the road runs out and the Gulf of Mexico takes over, Key West operates by its own logic. The light here is different — low, salt-softened, the kind that makes everything look slightly overexposed. It's the southernmost city in the continental United States, ninety miles from Cuba and a long way, in temperament, from anywhere else.
The island made its first fortune from shipwrecks, its second from cigars, and somewhere along the way it became a place where writers, presidents, and people reinventing themselves all arrived and stayed longer than they planned.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who keep coming back tend to have the same advice: walk Whitehead Street in the early morning before the cruise ships dock, find the Fort Zachary Taylor beach on a weekday, and give Duval Street a wide berth after dark unless that's precisely what you're after. The Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square is genuinely worth doing once.
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How Key West came to be
John W. Simonton bought the island on January 19, 1822, for the equivalent of $2,000 in pesos. Two months later, Lt. Commander Matthew C. Perry sailed in on the USS Shark and planted the American flag, settling any question of sovereignty. By the 1830s, Key West was the wealthiest city in the United States per capita — built almost entirely on the wrecking industry, salvaging cargo from ships that foundered on the reef.
Henry Flagler's Over-Sea Railroad reached the island in 1912, only for the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 to end train service for good. The Overseas Highway followed in 1938, stitching Key West back to the mainland by road and setting the stage for the slow drift toward tourism that defines it today.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Key West in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Winters are warm and dry, with temperatures in the low-to-mid 70s Fahrenheit — the most comfortable time to be outside. Summer brings genuine heat, high humidity, and the real possibility of afternoon thunderstorms or, between June and November, hurricanes.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.