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Dry Tortugas National Park
Fort Jefferson and remote coral keys 70 miles west of Key West
About 70 miles (113 km) west of Key West, at the far end of the Florida Keys, a six-sided brick fortress fills almost all of tiny Garden Key. Fort Jefferson, built from 1846 into the 1870s and never finished, used more than 16 million bricks and is the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere. It was meant to guard shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico, but it is best remembered as a Civil War-era prison, whose inmates included Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted as a Lincoln assassination conspirator after treating John Wilkes Booth and later pardoned.
Juan Ponce de León named the islands Las Tortugas in 1513 after the sea turtles his crew caught, and sailors added Dry for the lack of fresh water. More than 99 percent of the park is open water, with seven small keys, coral reefs, seagrass beds and more than 300 historic shipwrecks. From February to September, Bush Key closes to protect nesting sooty terns and brown noddies. Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed Fort Jefferson National Monument in 1935, and Congress made it Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992. Visitors arrive only by ferry, seaplane or private boat.