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Cape Coral

What Ft. Myers is to one side of the great Caloosahatchee River, Cape Coral is to the other. Cape Coral is not a beach community, nor yet an old place name. It’s been around since the Army Corps of Engineers dug hundreds of miles of canals as a mosquito control project in the 1940’s (one theory), or at least since two brothers figured out how to do the same thing and began selling cheap lots (often sight unseen) to dreamers up north in the 1950’s (the other theory). But the city really did not take off – almost nobody lived there – until about 15 or 20 years ago.

Now Cape Coral is bigger than Ft. Myers. It’s a completely modern residential community with a diverse array of commercial areas, and a well laid out infrastructure of roads, canals, and bridges. The overwhelming impression one has of Cape Coral is that it’s big and substantial; it’s part of what lends greater Ft. Myers its busy metropolitan feel.

My European friends tell me they’ve never heard of Cape Coral and can’t find out anything about it in their guide books. Well, that’s about to change. Cape Coral is the largest city by area between Tampa and Miami, 114 square miles. It boasts a population of 150,000 full-time residents and another 25,000 snowbirds, or seasonal residents; the projected 2010 combination of the two will be almost a quarter million. The median age is just over 40, so it’s a young, dynamic population, and pretty self-contained: two-thirds of Cape Coral residents spend more than half their money in the city.

The city is built on a long fat peninsula bounded by the Caloosahatchee on the East and South, and the long, narrow Matlacha Pass and its estuary on the West, which separates intensely developed Cape Coral from totally undeveloped Pine Island. The Gulf of Mexico Beaches – Sanibel-Captiva, Ft. Myers Beach, Lovers Key, Bonita Beach – are 40 minutes or more away. (And traffic, especially in season, can be brutal.)

Pine Island, reachable by a short bridge across Matlacha Pass, is Cape Coral’s secret resource. Pine Island is a world away, though but a few minutes, from Cape Coral, and truly, for now at least, a remaining piece of very old Florida. The surrounding Pine Island Aquatic Preserve covers almost 100 square miles with more than 60 miles of coastline consisting of shallow bays and lagoons, islands, and mangrove isles. There is world-class kayaking, boating and fishing access to Pine Island Sound and San Carlos Bay.

Pine Island also provides Cape Coral residents with some funky restaurants clustered mostly at Matlacha, a tiny fishing village on the pass. If you want to go out for fresh seafood, it doesn’t get any better than this! Cape Coral residents also have choices in the opposite direction:

To the East, across the bridges over the Caloosahatchee, lies Ft. Myers, with all the things you’d expect to find in an older, established city, with museums, the arts, music, and restaurants.
What Cape Coral does have in abundance is excelent, unusually wide canals with easy access to the Caloosahatchee. Not all 400 miles of canals are born equal: it can be a long haul, ½ hr to the River, and 1 hour to the Gulf by boat, if you’re back deep inside the city. But in general, this is still largely affordable waterfront in a terrific part of the state of Florida, in a terrific city nobody will have trouble finding in the future.

For more information see the links to the left or the map to the right.