The Everglades region of southern Florida has generally been supposed to be an American product without a rival. This notion must be revised. Within a few hours' ride of Havana, Cuba, it is possible to enter a region that not only duplicates all the interesting features of the great swamp at the southern end of the Florida Peninsula, but is one that has additional attractions to offer This Cuban Everglades is on the south coast of the island, within easy reach of the capital, by rail, or by water from Batabano, the port south of Havana. It is known as the Zapata-the Shoe-or the Great Zapata Swamp. Its area is approximately eighteen hundred square miles, or more than a million acres.
Like the American Everglades it rests upon a platform of coral limestone, and embraces vast stretches of peat bog and marl plains covered with sawgrass, resembling immense fields of waving grain. Large tracts of creamcolored marl like that southwest of Miami skirt the Caribbean Sea. In addition, there are areas of dense mangrove, thick tropical swampland woods, and strange rocky areas penetrated by myriads of cavities.
One of the interesting features of the Zapata is the extensive area of cavernous limestone land, where, without a vestige of visible soil, silk cotton, or ceiba, trees four feet in diameter are growing. Florida has nothing precisely like this, although the limestone country south of Miami, where one sees so many orchards of alligator pears growing on shallow coral limestone soil, is similar. One area of this rock land, which in Spanish is called piedra hueco, or holey rock, is nearly fifty miles long. Here and there occur patches of red soil a foot or more in depth, but a large proportion of the formation is nothing but rock at the surface. Nevertheless, all of it is forested.
Numerous large trees are found where it would be impossible to collect so much as a spoonful of soil from an acre of ground, except by burrowing into the frequent deep holes, some of which lookas if they had been bored with an auger. These trees make their start in pockets and holes in the limestone where collections of leaves and slight accumulations of disintegrated rock furnish them with material for growth. Their roots wander about over the surface of the rock in search of food, finally plunging through holes to find sustenance in soil hidden in the depths of cavernous recesses within the coral stone. In places there are numerous projections of sharp-pointed limestone. Such areas are known as "dog tooth land." One must be careful in walking through these, as it is not safe to stumble where there are so many fixed bayonets.
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