Florida National Parks

Florida has three national parks, Everglades, Biscayne and Dry Tortugas, inside a larger set of 11 National Park Service units that also includes two preserves, two seashores, two national monuments and two national memorials.

The National Park Service's Florida page lists the 11 units with their gateway towns (NPS, Florida). They are Everglades National Park (Miami, Naples and Homestead), Biscayne National Park (Miami, Key Biscayne and Homestead), Big Cypress National Preserve (Ochopee) and Dry Tortugas National Park (Key West), Canaveral National Seashore (Titusville and New Smyrna Beach), Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas national monuments (St. Augustine), and Fort Caroline National Memorial with the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve (Jacksonville), De Soto National Memorial (Bradenton) and Gulf Islands National Seashore (Gulf Breeze, Florida, and Ocean Springs, Mississippi).

The forts among them, with their hours and history, have their own guide in the Florida historic forts article in this section; this page covers the full list and what each charges at the gate.

Everglades National Park protects 1.5 million acres and charges $35 per private vehicle for seven days.

The Park Service says Everglades was established in 1947 as the first national park created for its biodiversity, covering wetland, forest and marine habitats, and that it is a major source of drinking water for South Florida residents (NPS, Florida). Next door, Big Cypress National Preserve conserves over 729,000 acres of the Big Cypress Swamp, whose fresh water feeds the Everglades and the estuaries of the southwest coast and shelters the Endangered Florida panther.

At the Everglades gate, a private vehicle pass is $35, a motorcycle $30 and a hiker, bicyclist or paddler 16 or older $20, each good for seven consecutive days at every park entrance (NPS, Everglades fees). The park is cashless: the Homestead and Shark Valley entrance stations and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Visitor Center on the Gulf Coast take credit and debit only. Visitors who are not US residents, 16 and older, pay an extra $100 per person unless they hold an Annual or America the Beautiful pass. Big Cypress, by contrast, charges no entrance fee; it collects fees for some facilities and a $100 annual permit for each off-road vehicle used on preserve trails (NPS, Big Cypress fees).

Four of the six Florida park units in the table below charge an entrance fee, and two, Biscayne and Big Cypress, charge no entrance fee.

Canaveral collects at the Apollo Beach and Playalinda Beach entrance stations, card only, and its $45 annual pass covers one vehicle per visit for 12 months (NPS, Canaveral fees). Gulf Islands posts its $25 vehicle price for January 1 through September 30, good for up to six people for seven days in any of its Florida fee areas, plus a $45 park annual pass (NPS, Gulf Islands fees). A traveler planning several Florida units in one year can compare those park passes with the $80 federal annual pass that the same fee pages list.

Both are water parks: Dry Tortugas is reached only by boat or seaplane from Key West, and Biscayne's island keys can be reached only by boat.

Dry Tortugas lies almost 70 miles west of Key West and covers 100 square miles, mostly open water around seven small islands (NPS, Florida). Its entrance fee is $15 per person for seven days, with anyone 15 or younger exempt, including international visitors (NPS, Dry Tortugas fees). Ferry tickets already include that fee but not camping, and private boaters and visitors on private seaplanes are asked to buy a digital pass in advance on Recreation.gov. The same fee page gives two versions for the seaplane: one line says it collects the fee before departing Key West, another that it charges the fee on arrival.

Biscayne has no entrance fee, but day docking at Boca Chita Key and Elliott Key costs $25 from Friday through Monday and on federal holidays, and overnight camping and docking costs $60 per night for up to two tents and six people (NPS, Biscayne fees). Slips and campsites are first come, first served, cannot be reserved and are paid through the Recreation.gov app, which must be downloaded before arrival. The Biscayne visitor center sells only 4th grade, Access and military passes; senior and annual passes are sold at Everglades, Big Cypress and other nearby sites.

Five of the Florida units are monuments, memorials or a historic preserve: Castillo de San Marcos, Fort Matanzas, Fort Caroline, the Timucuan Preserve and De Soto National Memorial.

The Park Service describes Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine as the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States, interpreting more than 450 years of cultural intersections, and Fort Matanzas as a coquina watchtower completed in 1742 on about 300 acres of coastal dunes and marsh (NPS, Florida). In Jacksonville, Fort Caroline recalls the French settlement of la Caroline, where battles between France and Spain marked the first time European nations fought for land in what is now the United States, and the Timucuan Preserve covers 6,000 years of human history, including Kingsley Plantation.

De Soto National Memorial in Bradenton marks the May 1539 landfall of Hernando de Soto's army in Tampa Bay, the start of what the Park Service calls a four year, four thousand mile expedition (NPS, Florida). Canaveral National Seashore also holds history: ancient Timucua shell mounds on a barrier island shaped by dunes, coastal hammocks and Mosquito Lagoon.

The statewide count on the Park Service's Florida page is 13,713,058 visitors, a figure the page labels as fiscal year 2020 (FY2020 figures, per NPS, for the year that ended September 30, 2020).

The same By the Numbers box credits Florida park tourism with $1,373,000,000 in economic benefit, records $175,225,407 in Land and Water Conservation Fund money appropriated for Florida projects since 1965, and counts 46 National Historic Landmarks, 18 National Natural Landmarks and one World Heritage Site in the state (NPS, Florida). The page labels all of those numbers as figures for the fiscal year that ended 9/30/2020.

For a free visit to a Florida unit, the 2026 fee-free days on the Park Service fee pages still ahead include Theodore Roosevelt's birthday on October 27 and Veterans Day on November 11, when sites that charge entry admit US citizens and residents free; other fees, including timed entry or reservation fees, may apply (NPS, Biscayne fees).

Last verified: October 19, 2026, after re-reading the Park Service Florida state page and the fee pages for Everglades, Biscayne, Big Cypress, Canaveral, Gulf Islands and Dry Tortugas.