The other day we decided to go to Key Largo because I wanted to take some photos of random things that I see on our drives. We were going to stop at Pennykamp Park to walk Murray but then I saw a sign for the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park. I had never heard of the place so we decided to check it out and ended up taking a 3 mile walk through the nature trails. Sadly, the only wildlife we saw were a few spiders and a few male Cardinals. During our walk I kept thinking of the South Florida python hunt that was currently happening. 39 had been found so far and I wondered if we were going to stumble upon one during our walk. However, no python discoveries for us that day.
d 
During our walk we came across a massive, abandoned and decaying structure full of very amateur graffiti. I love stuff like this! We had no clue what this place was and we heard a lady on a bike say it used to be the place of a "drug lord" - well, that's interesting! I had to know more! We explored for a bit and it started getting late in the day so we stopped at Starbucks for coffee and headed home.
Later that night I did some research and found a totally different story than that of a drug lord. The place is called Port Bougainville and it was once a development meant to have a 2800-unit complex in the style of a Mediterranean fishing village, complete with a helicopter landing pad, a boat yard, service station, shopping mall, and jetport. When environmentalists caught wind of the project and the danger the coral reef (one of the world's largest) and nature area was in they started a movement to stop the project and after a long battle were victorious.
Wow.
The park is named after Anna Dagny Johnson, a key environmentalist whose efforts helped preserve the natural habitat for endangered and threatened plant and animal species as well as the Florida Keys coral reef ecosystem.
(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix AW130)
No comments:
Post a Comment