Tons of gators! Everglades National Park: Ochopee, Florida

Tons of gators! Everglades National Park: Ochopee, Florida

The Everglades National Park is the largest tropical wilderness in the United States and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi River.

Around one million people visit the park each year.

Everglades is the third-largest national park in the lower 48 after Death Valley and Yellowstone.

UNESCO declared the Everglades & Dry Tortugas Biosphere Reserve in 1976 and listed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1979, and the Ramsar Convention included the park on its list of Wetlands of International Importance in 1987.

Everglades is one of only three locations in the world to appear on all three lists.

It once stretched across a swath of wetlands from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay but by the mid-1900s nearly half of the area had been drained to make way for farms and urban development.

The park was established in 1947, after decades of activism, to preserve a treasured 1.5 million acres of the ecosystem.