In the far southwest corner of Florida, just north of the Everglades and south of the mangroves of the Rookery, you'll find cosmopolitan Marco Island, a city of beach-front condo high-rises and manicured suburban streets that's southwest Florida's answer to Fort Lauderdale. Because of Marco Island’s extensively developed, it’s the last place you’d expect to find one of the most beautiful unspoiled beaches in Florida.
Tigertail Beach is a Collier County park that isn't widely known outside the region. It’s also a relatively new stretch of beach, one that only seventeen years ago was an off-shore sandbar. The winds of Hurricane Wilma piled sand onto the southern end of the sandbar, and today Sand Dollar Beach, as it's called, is connected to the main beach of Tigertail.
Parking is free for Collier County residents with a current beach sticker, just as it is for every other Collier County beach. Tigertail Beach has a distinctive and maybe unexpected amenities, such as clean and well-kept changing rooms and a first-rate snack bar that serves beer, wines and sandwiches in a flower-lined patio shaded by beach umbrellas. There’s also a great playground and a bird-watching tower with views of the shore birds. The concession also stand rents kayaks, paddleboards and other beach gear.
This amenity-filled part of the park faces a salt-water lagoon, not the actual beach itself. But some visitors rent beach umbrellas and set up for the day right here, because you can cross the lagoon and leave all that development behind you. Across the lagoon to the north is Sand Dollar beach, and to the south stretches three miles of beach with white sugar sand, hundreds of shells, dolphins swimming off-shore, and so many shore birds that it’s a stop on the Great Florida Birding Trail.
On the far side of the lagoon, at high tide the path is actually a small channel of water a few inches deep, filled with schools of small fish. When the ground rises a few inches, the sandy soil is home to armies of fiddler crabs, which part like the Red Sea as you walk the path.
Crossing the lagoon is an adventure. If you have any gear to bring to the beach side, you'll have to hold it over your head to keep it dry, just like pioneers fording a river. On the other side of the lagoon, though, is a stunning vista of blinding white sugar sand and blue-green water.
Of course, wading across a lagoon to get to the beach isn't for everyone. If you're one of those people who's too squeamish to wade through the muck of a lagoon holding your gear over your head, consider riding across on a beach float or a kayak or paddleboard. Or, you can walk around the lagoon to the south to reach the beach. That takes about 20 minutes if you park at the far south end of the parking lot, which is much larger than the small lot you encounter when you enter the park.
490 Hernando Drive
Marco Island
Comments