49 Fun Facts About Key West

The U.S. Navy first set up a base at Key West in 1823 to drive out which enemy?

Caribbean pirates. Commodore David Porter hunted them through the West Indies with a squadron of shallow-draft schooners and barges, yet by 1826 the Navy had already moved its base north to Pensacola.

Key West's original Spanish name, Cayo Hueso, literally means what?

Bone cay. In the usual telling, Spanish visitors found the island strewn with the bones of earlier native inhabitants, who are said to have used it as a communal graveyard.

Key West is the county seat of which Florida county?

Monroe County also takes in a huge slice of the mainland Everglades, most of its land, yet almost nobody lives there: nearly all of its people are out on the Keys.

Which famous roadway has its southern terminus in Key West?

U.S. Route 1 starts at mile marker 0 in Key West and runs some 2,370 miles to the Canadian border; out along the Keys, street addresses simply follow the nearest mile marker.

What is Key West's main commercial street, running from the Gulf to the Atlantic?

Duval Street crosses the whole island in just 14 blocks, and bar-hopping from one end to the other is a ritual known as the Duval Crawl.

Which Spanish conquistador led the first recorded European expedition past Key West, in 1513?

Juan Ponce de León named the whole island chain Los Mártires, the Martyrs, because from a distance the islands looked to him like suffering men.

Which independence hero raised money and recruits among Key West's exiles for a war against Spain?

José Martí made repeated trips in the early 1890s to unite the island's divided Cuban exiles, and the Cuban Revolutionary Party he founded took shape during those visits.

Which naval officer raised the U.S. flag over Key West in 1822?

Matthew C. Perry, then a lieutenant commanding the schooner Shark, renamed the island Thompson's Island after the Navy secretary, a name that never stuck; three decades later he opened Japan to American trade.

Which naturalist's visit to Key West in the 1830s is honoured by a house museum and tropical garden there?

John James Audubon drew Keys birds for The Birds of America on that trip. The house named for him was due for demolition in 1958, and its rescue is credited with sparking the island's restoration movement.

Which trade made Key West a wealthy town in the first half of the 19th century?

Salvaging shipwrecks, known as wrecking, was licensed work: from 1828 a U.S. court sitting in Key West decided what share of each rescued cargo the wreckers could keep.

Which fort let Union troops hold Key West throughout the Civil War, even though Florida had seceded?

Fort Taylor was occupied at midnight on January 13, 1861 by a Union captain acting without orders, and it went on to serve as a base against Confederate blockade runners.

Refugees from Cuba's Ten Years' War made Key West a major producer of what in the late 1800s?

Cigars. Whole factories moved over from Cuba, and before long Spanish was the island's second language and a son of Cuban independence leader Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was its mayor.

Which U.S. warship sailed from Key West to Havana in 1898, where it blew up?

USS Maine exploded three weeks after reaching Havana, a loss that helped push the United States into war with Spain; some of her dead are buried in the Key West Cemetery.

The Overseas Railroad that reached Key West in 1912 extended which tycoon's railway?

Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil co-founder, was 82 and nearly blind when he rode the first train into Key West in January 1912; he died the following year.

Which airline began in 1927 by flying mail from Key West to Havana?

Pan Am won the Key West to Havana mail contract in 1927 and carried its first passengers between the two a year later; within a decade its flying-boat Clippers were crossing the Pacific.

What replaced the Overseas Railroad after a 1935 hurricane wrecked it?

An automobile highway. The state bought the wrecked line's roadbed and surviving bridges and laid a road on top, so from 1938 drivers could reach Key West without the old ferry crossing.

Which US president spent 175 days at the Key West 'Little White House'?

Harry S. Truman first came in November 1946 for a rest in the sun and kept coming back, governing between fishing trips and poker games at a table built for him.

Which inventor lived in the Little White House during World War I, perfecting underwater weapons?

He reportedly worked up 41 underwater weapons in six months; the first presidential visitor to the house was Taft in 1912.

In 1982 Key West staged a mock secession from the United States, declaring itself what?

The Conch Republic was a protest: a Border Patrol roadblock on the only road out was scaring off visitors, and Key West still celebrates its 'independence' every April 23.

What did Key West's mock rebels use as ammunition when they 'declared war' on the United States in 1982?

Stale Cuban bread was the rebels' weapon. Their 'prime minister', the mayor, then surrendered and asked the United States for foreign aid, and the roadblock that started it all was quietly removed.

In Key West, where natives are called 'Conchs', who earns the title 'Freshwater Conch'?

A seven-year resident. 'Conch' is thought to have begun as a put-down, and the islanders who inherited the name turned it into a title that newcomers now have to earn.

What does Key West's famous painted concrete buoy claim to mark, a boast that is slightly off?

'Southernmost point in the continental U.S.' is a stretch: Navy land on the island reaches farther south, and the real record belongs to Ballast Key, a small island out to the west.

Which Hemingway novel, written at his Whitehead Street house in the 1930s, is set in Key West itself?

To Have and Have Not follows a Key West boat captain driven to smuggling by the Depression; the 1944 Bogart and Bacall film kept the title but moved the story to Martinique.

The cats that still roam the Hemingway House are famous for what physical trait?

Extra toes. The museum says its cats descend from Snow White, a white six-toed cat a ship's captain gave Hemingway; about half show the trait, though all carry the gene.

Which coin is set in the cement beside Hemingway's Key West swimming pool, a souvenir of his fury at its cost?

A penny. The pool cost $20,000 in the 1930s, and Hemingway is said to have produced the coin and told his wife Pauline she might as well take his last cent too.

Which Key West bar, run by Hemingway's fishing companion, was his 1930s haunt?

Sloppy Joe's was run by Joe Russell, who took Hemingway fishing; every July the bar now fills with bearded hopefuls for its Hemingway look-alike contest.

Which playwright kept a modest Key West bungalow as his home until his death in 1983?

Tennessee Williams is believed to have worked on A Streetcar Named Desire at the island's La Concha Hotel in 1947, before settling into the house that was his home for more than thirty years.

Mallory Square is famous for a nightly celebration of what?

The sunset gets a round of applause from the crowd as it sinks into the Gulf, the finale of a nightly dockside show of jugglers, musicians and craft stalls.

Why is the filling of a genuine Key lime pie pale rather than green?

Ripe Key limes are yellow: the fruit is usually picked green but yellows as it ripens, and its juice is yellow too, so a filling made the classic way never turns green.

Key lime pie is Florida's official state pie, but which berry dessert became the state dessert in 2022?

Strawberry shortcake got the title at a bill-signing held at Plant City's strawberry festival, where it is the signature dish; Key lime pie kept its own crown as state pie.

Fort Jefferson, the vast unfinished fortress in the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, is built of what?

Brick: more than 16 million went into the walls, and the fort was never finished because its builders feared any more weight would make it settle further.

Which prisoner was held at Fort Jefferson for setting John Wilkes Booth's broken leg?

Samuel Mudd took over as prison doctor when yellow fever killed the fort's surgeon in 1867, and President Andrew Johnson pardoned him two years later.

Which Spanish galleon, sunk by a 1622 hurricane, did Key West treasure hunters finally locate in 1985?

Nuestra Señora de Atocha went down laden with gold, silver and gems bound for Spain; her finders fought the State of Florida to the Supreme Court for the right to keep the treasure, and won in 1982.

Which former chicken farmer became Key West's best-known treasure hunter?

Mel Fisher raised chickens in California before opening a dive shop; through years of debts and lawsuits he kept his crews going with the daily promise 'Today's the day'.

Jimmy Buffett's 1977 song most associated with Key West's laid-back image is named after which cocktail?

Margarita gave 'Margaritaville' its name. Buffett had moved to Key West in 1972, and the first Margaritaville shop he opened there in 1985 grew into a chain of restaurants and resorts.

The 1980 boatlift that landed some 125,000 Cubans in Florida, many at Key West, is named for which Cuban port?

Mariel was opened by Fidel Castro to any Cuban who had someone coming to collect them, so Cuban Americans sailed over in their hundreds; the first boat back docked in Key West.

The tiny Key deer is mostly found on which Florida island?

Big Pine Key shelters most of the herd. Poaching and development had pushed the deer close to extinction by the 1950s, and a refuge founded there in 1957 has brought numbers back to several hundred.

Before it reached Miami, the Cuban sandwich likely began in cafés for Cuban workers in Key West and which other city?

Tampa, where some of Key West's factory owners moved their businesses after the island's great fire of 1886, adds salami to its version and still spars with Miami over whose sandwich is the real one.

From about 1830 until the Civil War, Key West was a major American producer of which everyday commodity?

Salt was made by letting seawater dry out in shallow ponds on the island's eastern side; most of those ponds were later filled in, and the airport now stands there.

In World War II the Navy laid a pipeline down the Keys to bring Key West what?

Drinking water. Until the pipe from the mainland arrived in 1942, islanders relied on rain caught off their roofs and stored in cisterns, some built right beneath the house.

Which Cold War crisis brought President Kennedy to Key West soon after it ended?

The Cuban Missile Crisis brought Kennedy back to Key West in 1962; he had first come in March 1961 for a one-day summit with Britain's Harold Macmillan at the Little White House.

Which bestselling novelist for young readers opened a bookshop with her husband in Key West in 2016?

Judy Blume and her husband, George Cooper, set the shop up as a nonprofit; he had already helped found the island's independent cinema, the Tropic.

Which city did Key West narrowly outrank to stand as Florida's largest at the 1890 census?

Jacksonville had 17,201 people to the island's 18,080. Miami, today's giant, would not even be incorporated for another six years.

The early Key West settlers nicknamed 'Conchs' came from which islands?

The Bahamas. Many were the children of Loyalists who had fled the American Revolution for British soil, and an Old Town neighbourhood, Bahama Village, still carries the islands' name.

Which holiday gives its name to the 1935 hurricane that destroyed the railway to Key West?

Labor Day 1935 brought one of only four Category 5 hurricanes on record, as of 2025, to strike the contiguous United States; its surge overturned a rescue train, leaving only the locomotive upright.

What is the official motto of the city of Key West?

One Human Family was adopted by the city as its official philosophy in 2000, and the county that covers the rest of the Keys soon took it up as well.

Solares Hill, the highest natural point in Key West, rises to roughly what height above sea level?

About 18 feet. The island averages only about eight, so when Hurricane Wilma's surge flooded most of Key West in 2005, the high ground around Solares Hill stayed dry.

Which president recuperated at Key West's Little White House after suffering a heart attack in office?

Dwight D. Eisenhower came for the 1955-56 new year, three months after his heart attack; on the eve of leaving he told reporters he felt stronger and as ready for work as a person could be.

Which James Bond film shot scenes in Key West, including a meeting with M at the Hemingway House?

Licence to Kill has Bond try to resign at the writer's house, where M revokes his licence instead; its crew also sent an armoured truck off the Seven Mile Bridge.