Start from 35 curated places around Key West, FL, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
El Siboney Restaurant
A family-run Cuban kitchen off the tourist track that locals have leaned on since 1984, serving ropa vieja, vaca frita, and butterflied yellowtail with yellow rice and brothy black beans. Big portions, fair prices, and zero pretense under a tin roof. Best for a hearty, honest lunch that fuels a long island day.
Blue Heaven
A famously laid-back Caribbean breakfast in a Bahama Village courtyard where roosters strut between the tables and the key lime pie towers under a cloud of meringue. The shrimp eggs Benedict and banana-walnut pancakes are the morning move. Best for a leisurely, only-in-Key-West breakfast you'll be glad you waited for.
Trails & outdoors
Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail
The paved rail-trail that shadows US-1 up the keys, with the lower-keys sections offering flat, breezy riding and walking over old bridges and past mangrove flats. From Stock Island you can string together miles of car-free coastline. Best for a cycling morning that gets you out of town along the water.
Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden
The only frost-free botanical garden in the continental US, with shaded nature trails winding through native hardwood hammock, freshwater ponds, and migratory-bird habitat on Stock Island. It's a cool, quiet green pocket most visitors never reach. Best for a calm nature walk and birdwatching away from the crowds.
Things to do
Mel Fisher Maritime Museum
A museum built around treasure hauled from the 1622 wreck of the Atocha, with gold bars you can touch, emeralds, and the story of a decades-long salvage obsession. It's a tight, genuinely thrilling hour of real sunken treasure. Best for a rainy afternoon or anyone who's ever daydreamed about shipwrecks.
Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory
A glass-domed conservatory filled with hundreds of free-flying butterflies, tropical birds, and a pair of resident flamingos in a warm, misty garden. It's calm, beautiful, and a guaranteed hit with kids. Best for a gentle indoor escape from sun or rain near the Southernmost Point.
Landmarks & sights
Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum
The Spanish-colonial house where Hemingway wrote through the 1930s, now a museum still run around the descendants of his polydactyl cats. The studio above the carriage house and the gardens are the draw, along with the dozens of six-toed cats lounging on the furniture. Best for a first-morning dose of the island's literary myth before the streets fill.
Southernmost Point Buoy
The painted concrete buoy marking the southernmost spot in the continental US, 90 miles from Cuba and one of the most photographed objects in Florida. The photo is the entire experience, and the line for it can be long. Best caught early or at dusk when the queue thins.