Within sight of Miami, yet worlds away, Biscayne protects a rare combination of aquamarine waters, emerald islands, and fish-bejeweled coral reefs. Evidence of 10,000 years of human history is here too; from prehistoric tribes to shipwrecks, and pineapple farmers to presidents. For many, the park is a boating, fishing, and diving destination, while others enjoy a warm breeze and peaceful scenery.
Junior Ranger booklets at every visitor center. Top trails by age — filtered by our hand-checked minimum age, shade and restrooms:
Dogs are limited to select trails, roads and campgrounds. Where they can't go, we map the nearest boarding and 24/7 vets.
Park waters are shallow enough that NPS tells boaters tide predictions matter as much as the chart: the harbour entrance at Boca Chita is about four feet at low tide, and Elliott Key's is about two and a half. Low tide at Boca Chita is Government Cut's plus one hour forty-three minutes, so the tide table you plan against is Miami's, not the island's.
Official details →Homestead / Speedway Blvd — last fuel and the last marina services
Docking at Boca Chita and Elliott Keys: $25.00 Friday - Monday and Federal Holidays Camping at Boca Chita and Elliott Keys: $35.00 per night. Payments must be made on site using the recreation.gov phone app.
Convoy Point grounds, Jetty Trail, kayak launch, and picnic area open at 7 a.m. and close at 5:30 p.m. If you are using a ride share service for transportation to and from the park, ensure ride share services can be...
Please use caution in park waters due to navigational markers that may be missing or moved due to unforeseen circumstances.
The sweet spot for Biscayne National Park is January–April & November–December — right now: peak hurricane month; the quietest time in the park and the least predictable.
Calories, water and timing for hot, high or long days — built into every gear checklist. Informational only, not medical advice.
Get the fall refuel plan →NAISMITH · CDC · ACSM · how these numbers are worked out
4 trails
| Trail | Length | Gain | Dog | Kids | Stroller | Shade | Restrooms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Convoy Point Jetty Walk | 0.8 mi | — | Yes | 0+ | Yes | 5% | Yes |
| Boca Chita Key Trail | 0.5 mi | — | No | 5+ | No | 30% | Yes |
| Elliott Key Loop Trail | 1 mi | — | No | 6+ | No | 75% | Yes |
| Spite Highway | 6 mi | — | No | 10+ | No | 80% | Yes |
Which side of Biscayne National Park actually saves you drive time — with live rates, not "top-10 from nowhere".
Wake up inside the gate — first light at the trailhead, no morning commute.
Check availability →Rooms minutes from the entrance with pools, breakfast and parking.
Check rates →PARTNER LINKS · RATES SHOWN ON THE PARTNER SITE
We map the closest regional and major airports for each park we cover in depth.
A car is essential at most parks — book early for summer and holiday weekends.
Compare cars →Where lots fill by 8 AM and which shuttle skips the stress — see "Know before you go" above.
Boat, wildlife and scenic tours matched to Biscayne National Park.
See tours →Vets, urgent care and groceries around Biscayne National Park — the block you hope you never need.
The full planning picture — hand-written, kept honest. Tap any section to open it.
Biscayne is a national park you mostly cannot walk through. Ninety-five percent of it is water, and the National Park Service says so plainly — which is why the park's waters are open twenty-four hours a day while its one mainland gate closes at 5:30 in the afternoon. What that protects is a rare gradient: mangrove forest along the mainland shore, the shallow estuary of Biscayne Bay, a chain of islands that are the raised remains of an ancient reef, and — at the eastern edge — the northernmost stretch of the Florida Reef, the only living barrier reef in the continental United States. All four sit within sight of the Miami skyline.
It is also one of the least crowded parks in the system for its location. The park's own statistics page records 709,000 visitors in 2019 — a fraction of what parks with roads through them receive, because here the road is a boat.
South Florida inverts the usual national-park calendar: winter is high season. December through April is the dry season — warm, clear, calm water, the best snorkelling visibility and the fewest mosquitoes. NPS puts the average January high at 77°F and the August high at 90°F.
The wet season runs May through October, with afternoon thunderstorms and rainfall climbing to over ten inches in August at the nearest weather station. Hurricane season is June 1 through November 30, and September is its peak — the quietest month in the park and the least predictable one to plan a boat trip around. Late July brings the state's lobster mini-season, which fills the water with boats regardless of the weather.
The mainland base is Convoy Point, at 9700 SW 328th Street (Sir Lancelot Jones Way), Homestead. The grounds are open 7 AM–5:30 PM daily and the Dante Fascell Visitor Center 9 AM–5 PM. Adams Key is open 9 AM until official sunset. The islands and the reef have no other access: the only way to Boca Chita Key and Elliott Key is by boat.
Without a boat of your own, the Biscayne National Park Institute (786-335-3644) is the park's own partner for snorkelling trips to the Maritime Heritage Trail and the reef, island cruises, sailing and paddling in Jones Lagoon. Several authorised operators also run trips, including Aboard Biscayne Adventures, Ace Diving, Coastal Runners, Diver's Paradise, Ocean Force Adventures, Sunplash and South Dade Charters.
Without a car, the city of Homestead runs a free trolley with a stop at Biscayne National Park, and every trolley is wheelchair accessible. That, plus the Jetty Walk and the visitor center, makes a genuine no-boat, no-car visit possible — an unusual thing to be able to say about a marine park.
The park has no entrance fee. It also has no timed entry, no lottery and no advance reservation of any kind — camping is explicitly first-come, first-served, and NPS states that no reservations may be made in advance. If you are used to planning a national park around a booking window opening at 8 AM six months out, there is nothing to set an alarm for here.
What you do pay, you pay on arrival, and only if you stay on the islands: $25 per day for docking (Friday–Monday and federal holidays) and $35 per night for camping, charged whether you sleep in a tent or on your docked boat. Staying overnight on a fee day means both — $60. Payment is cashless and app-only: scan the QR code at the harbour kiosk with the Recreation.gov app. Download the app before you leave the mainland, because there is nothing on the islands to download it with. NPS designed the payment around exactly that gap — in its own words, "No cell connectivity? No problem! Your payment will be marked as 'pending' until you reach cell connectivity later." Plan on having no signal out there, and treat that as the working assumption for navigation and emergencies too, not just for paying a fee.
One quirk worth knowing: only 4th grade, Access and U.S. military America the Beautiful passes are available here. Senior and annual passes are not sold at the park — there is no entrance fee for them to waive.
Biscayne's signature route is not a path. The Maritime Heritage Trail links six shipwrecks on the reef. NPS is blunt about the access: "Access to the sites on the trail is by boat only." You reach the trailhead by water and you travel the trail by swimming it.
Three are best suited to SCUBA divers: the Erl King (1891), which NPS describes as marking the transition from wooden sailing ships to steel steamers; the Alicia (1905), which went down laden with silks and silverware; and the Lugano (1913), the largest vessel ever wrecked in the Florida Keys at the time, now lying in 25 feet of water on Long Reef.
The rest can be enjoyed on a snorkel. The Mandalay (1966), the red-carpet ship of the windjammer fleet, sits shallow enough that NPS calls it an unparalleled opportunity for snorkelers. The Arratoon Apcar (1878) went down near where Fowey Rocks Lighthouse was being built, and an unidentified 19th-century wooden sailing vessel is marked now by little more than its ballast stones.
The park protects four ecosystems in a band only a few miles wide, and they are easiest to understand as a sequence you cross going seaward.
Mangrove forest lines the mainland shore. The tangled prop roots hold sediment in place against erosion and filter runoff before it reaches the bay, which is what keeps the water clear enough for the reef to survive further out. The same root architecture is a nursery for juvenile fish.
Biscayne Bay is a shallow estuary over a flat limestone floor, carpeted in seagrass. The shallowness that makes navigation demanding is exactly what lets sunlight reach the bottom. Manatees favour the bay in the cooler months.
The islands — Elliott Key, Boca Chita Key, Adams Key — are exposed Pleistocene reef: coral that grew when sea level was higher, now standing a few feet above the water and covered in tropical hardwood hammock.
The reef is the northern end of the Florida Reef, a living barrier that absorbs wave energy before it reaches the islands and the bay behind them. NPS counts hundreds of species of colourful fish on it — it declines to put a single number on that, and so do we. Everything inshore of the reef depends on it being there.
Biscayne is a Caribbean landfall as much as a Florida park, and NPS publishes what to expect at each access point rather than one undifferentiated list.
Convoy Point — yellow-crowned night herons (NPS adds "drive carefully!"), migratory warblers, loggerhead shrikes, northern mockingbirds, mangrove cuckoos, white ibis, and black and turkey vultures. In winter the shoreline adds red-breasted mergansers.
Black Point — mangrove cuckoo, prairie warblers and shorebirds, with great and little blue herons, snowy egrets, brown pelicans and spotted sandpipers along the shoreline.
Elliott Key — the Caribbean strays that make this park worth the boat ride: Bahama mockingbird and bananaquit, alongside red-headed woodpeckers, red-shouldered hawks, warblers, ruddy turnstones, least sandpipers and royal terns near the marina.
Boca Chita Key — wading birds, brown pelicans, royal terns and nesting Wilson's plover; give the grassy nesting areas room. Stiltsville collects double-crested cormorants, gulls and royal terns on its stilt houses. Jones Lagoon is for wading birds on the nest. And the offshore lighthouses — Fowey Rocks and Pacific Reef — draw brown boobies, magnificent frigatebirds, petrels and shearwaters, with peregrine falcons at Fowey Rocks.
The visitor center carries a family visit on its own if a boat trip does not work out. The Dante Fascell Visitor Center has a touch table where children can handle coral and other specimens, an aquarium, a theatre, and the Junior Ranger programme. The Jetty Walk immediately outside is 0.8 miles round trip on boardwalk and gravel, with ten interpretive stops and the bronze Fish Wall — short enough for small legs and flat the whole way.
Three practical warnings. There is no drinking water on Boca Chita, so an island day means carrying every bottle you will need. The islands are mangrove country and NPS is unambiguous about it — mosquitoes are present year round, with heavy populations in the warmer months, so repellent belongs on the packing list rather than in the glovebox. And swimming is not permitted in the boat harbours, which is where children naturally head first once the boat is tied up.
The mainland side is genuinely accessible. Convoy Point has four designated accessible parking spaces and wheelchair-accessible picnic tables throughout the grounds. The visitor center has ramp and elevator access, automatic door openers, ADA-compliant restrooms, wheelchair seating in the theatre and headphones with audio enhancement for films on request. The Jetty Walk boardwalk is accessible by wheelchair and other mobility devices, and the free Homestead trolley that stops at the park is wheelchair accessible too.
The islands are a different picture, and NPS is direct about it. Boca Chita has ADA-accessible bathrooms and bilingual exhibits, but the campsites are unpaved and the lighthouse is reached by stairs. Elliott Key has ramp access to the bathrooms, which NPS says are "best used for those with ambulatory devices and not wheelchairs", and the oceanside water access has no paved path — it needs a beach or off-road wheelchair.
The hazards here are marine, not alpine. NPS asks visitors to be aware of jellyfish, stingrays, sharks and American crocodiles, particularly near mangrove stands and sandy embankments, and to keep situational awareness rather than assume the shallows are empty.
For sun, NPS specifically asks for reef-safe sun protection or UV-blocking clothing, plus polarised glasses and a hat — the request is about the coral as much as about you.
For boating, the constraint is depth. Park waters are shallow enough that NPS treats tide predictions as being as important as the chart: Boca Chita's harbour entrance is about four feet at low tide and Elliott Key's about two and a half. The tide table you want is Miami's: NPS calculates low tide at Boca Chita by adding one hour and forty-three minutes to low tide at Government Cut. NOAA chart 11451 covers park waters. Personal watercraft — jet skis and waverunners — are prohibited throughout the park, and slow-speed zones exist to protect manatees and other wildlife.
Two rules that catch people out on arrival. Swimming is not permitted in the boat harbours — the water you have just tied up in is not the water you swim in. And insects are not seasonal here: NPS says mosquitoes are present year round on Boca Chita and that heavy populations should be expected in the warmer months. Repellent is packing-list equipment, not an afterthought.
Get a heads-up before timed-entry and lottery windows open — plus new guides for the parks you care about.
FREE · NO SPAM · UNSUBSCRIBE IN ONE TAP
4 trails, each with its own page — distance, elevation gain, water and restroom data where the park publishes it. Convoy Point Jetty Walk is the first in the table above.
Biscayne National Park grades C on our A–D pet-policy scale. Dogs are limited to select trails, roads and campgrounds. Leashes (6 ft max) are required everywhere.
Our age-rated trails here start at 0+, and 3 of them suit kids 8 and under.
© 2026 StayNear National Parks · About · Methodology · Privacy · Terms · Affiliate disclosure · Refunds