As South Florida national parks reckon with staff layoffs from the Trump White House, the latest visitor data shows attendance steadily rebounding and in some cases breaking records following the COVID-19 shutdown.
Dry Tortugas National Park set a new record for visitors in 2024 while the Big Cypress National Preserve marked a new high in 2022. Everglades and Biscayne national parks also saw visitor numbers bouncing back after the shutdown plunged attendance to new lows.
Altogether, the three parks and Big Cypress drew more than 3.5 million visitors — no small feat for public lands that are largely made up of water or swamp.
READ MORE: 'People are frightened': Sweeping Trump job cuts hit South Florida national parks
At Big Cypress, the nation’s first national preserve, more than 2.2 million visitors took a swing through 730,000 acres that include hardwood hammocks and freshwater cypress swamp. Whereas national parks have stricter rules to protect threatened wildlife, preserves allow more uses. In Big Cypress, that includes hunting and off-road vehicles that helped draw more than 2.9 million visitors in 2022, setting a new record.
Dry Tortugas hit a new record of more than 84,000 visitors in 2024 — nearly double the 2020 total of about 48,000, lows not seen since the 1980s. That’s despite getting walloped by Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022, which caused damage to the historic moat wall around the five-sided Fort Jefferson.
At Everglades and Biscayne national parks, attendance dropped slightly in 2024 after recovering from COVID lows.
In recent years, both parks have seen amenities added or replaced, despite record-breaking maintenance backlogs. The new Flamingo Lodge at Everglades reopened in late 2023 after the old lodge was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Biscayne National Park has expanded its public boat tours around a park that is 90% water.
As part of its broad cuts, the National Park Service laid off 1,000 employees in February, with hundreds more retiring. At least 17 park workers in South Florida, including half the Everglades restoration team at the park's South Florida Natural Resources Center, were laid off or retired. Another 10 staffers were also cut at South Florida’s national wildlife refuges from the Keys to Palm Beach County and west to the Gulf Coast.
The Trump administration has set a March 13 deadline for federal agencies to issue a second wave of layoffs as part of its effort to downsize the federal workforce.
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