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Everglades Day Safari from Miami: Airboat & Big Cypress

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Free cancellationExcellent quality

1/12

Duration9h

GroupUp to 13

LanguagesEN

PickupAt your hotel

Airboat Through the Everglades: Wildlife, Mangroves & a 1906 Trading Post

You get picked up from your hotel and spend the day moving through three distinct ecosystems: Big Cypress by van with a naturalist guide, the Everglades by airboat, and the Ten Thousand Islands by boat. Lunch is included, as are entry to the Historic Smallwood Store and all transport. The whole day runs 9 to 10 hours, and you return to your hotel in the late afternoon.

Step-by-step itinerary

Travel along Tamiami Trail ecotour
Take airboat tour in Everglades
Visit Big Cypress Oasis Visitor Center
Enjoy free lunch at Island Cafe
Explore Historic Smallwood Store museum
Boat tour through Ten Thousand Islands

The Experience

"You'll see things out here most people never get to see," our guide said as we pulled away from the dock, and he wasn't exaggerating. The day starts early with pickup from your Miami hotel, then a drive through Big Cypress National Preserve—700,000 acres of swamps, prairies, and hardwood hammocks that sit just north of Everglades National Park. The van windows frame sawgrass prairies and towering cypress trees draped in Spanish moss, and your naturalist guide points out the wildlife as it appears: white-tailed deer, otters, turtles, and birds you'd never spot from a highway. The Oasis Visitor Center sits right along the Tamiami Trail, and a quick stop there gives you a sense of the scale of what you're about to enter.

Then comes the airboat ride—flat-bottomed and built to skim over shallow wetlands where a regular boat can't go. The engine's loud, the wind hits hard, and suddenly you're gliding past alligators sunning on the banks and egrets lifting off into the sky. Your captain knows the waterways like someone who's lived here their whole life, and he shares stories about the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes, the early settlers, and how this ecosystem actually works. The airboat tour through Everglades National Park is the kind of thing you can't replicate anywhere else—it's fast, it's intimate with the landscape, and you're genuinely in the middle of it.

Lunch happens at Island Cafe in Everglades City, and it's included—fried oysters, grilled mahi, BBQ pork tacos, or grilled chicken, depending on what you want. After that, the Historic Smallwood Store in Chokoloskee pulls you back in time. Built in 1906 and perched on stilts above the Ten Thousand Islands, it's a trading post museum filled with artifacts from frontier settlers, Gladesmen, and the tribes who worked these waters. There are stories here—some of them dark, like the legend of outlaw Ed Watson—and it adds a human layer to everything you've seen so far. The mangrove wilderness boat cruise comes next, a 60-minute ride through the maze of the Ten Thousand Islands where you're looking for dolphins, manatees, sharks, and coastal birds. It's slower than the airboat, quieter, and it gives you time to actually absorb what you're seeing. By the time you're back in Miami, you've covered a lot of ground—literally and in terms of what the Everglades actually is.

What’s included

Hotel pickup and drop-off from select Miami locations.
narrated van tour through Big Cypress National Preserve.
expert naturalist or biologist guide.
airboat ride through the Everglades.
60-minute mangrove wilderness boat cruise in Everglades National Park.
entry to Historic Smallwood Store Museum.
lunch at Island Cafe.
transport by air-conditioned 13-passenger van.

Good to know

Moderate physical levelWheelchair accessiblePublic transport nearbyNot for heart conditions

Operated by Everglades Day Safari

Is this one for you?Book this if you want the main Everglades experience in one day without arranging separate transport, park entry, and timing—the fixed itinerary handles all three, and a naturalist guide turns what you're seeing into actual knowledge instead of just scenery.