Some of These Cypress Trees Predate the United States

The boardwalk at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary passes through bald cypress trees that were already centuries old when Columbus reached the Caribbean — some are estimated at 500 to 600 years old, part of the largest remaining old-growth bald cypress forest in the world. Almost none of Florida's original cypress forest survived the logging that swept the state through the 1940s and 1950s; loggers cut nearly everything comparable. This particular stand exists today only because a small coalition mobilized in 1953 and 1954, buying and protecting the land before timber crews reached it. The trees along the walkway are older than the country the sanctuary sits in.

Naples Pier has never actually been the same pier twice. The original structure went up in 1888, and it's been knocked down and rebuilt after hurricanes repeatedly ever since — in 1910, 1926, 1944, 1960, and again after Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Ian decades later. Every "historic" version visitors have walked out on has technically been a different physical structure than the one before it, rebuilt again and again on the same footprint because the city keeps choosing to put it back rather than let the Gulf have the final word.