This week’s dream: the maverick soul of the Florida Keys
A narrow chain of 1,700 coral isles curling through the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys have long attracted “misfits, renegades, outlaws and raconteurs”, says Douglas Rogers in Condé Nast Traveller, and the archipelago remains “moodily atmospheric”. Spanning much of its length is the national east-coast highway, US Route 1, which reaches the tip of the mainland just south of Miami and crosses a causeway to the northernmost of the main islands, Key Largo. From there, the road continues for 113 miles, bridging ten more islands and ending, half way to Havana, on Key West, the southern tip of the US.
Stop on Islamorada, a “sliver” of an island, for a lobster salad at the barefoot Morada Bay Beach Café, whose proprietor also owns The Moorings Village, a nearby hotel that features centrally in the Netflix series Bloodline. The place soon gets under your skin, with its “cerulean water, storm clouds rumbling in sapphire skies, breezes rustling the mangroves”. Key
West is more sophisticated, with an old town that almost rivals New Orleans’s French Quarter. Its colourful wooden two-storey frame homes date largely from the mid- to late-19th century, when locals got rich by salvaging cargoes from shipwrecks. During Prohibition, rum-running brought further wealth, attracting a “demimonde of shady characters”, inspiring classic films such as Key Largo, and attracting Ernest Hemingway, whose Victorian house is now a museum.
Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote also “partied” here, and the 1970s and 1980s saw another “creative explosion”, featuring the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. Trawl through Key West’s characterful bars, and you’ll meet plenty of old-timers who arrived, “lost and aimless”, in that era or earlier, and built empires for themselves. For all the “decadence” and the “communitarian” vibe, there’s also a “stubborn work ethic” out here on the edge of the world.