New eco-hotel at Everglades national park built for age of super hurricanes

Acollection of repurposed shipping containers, welded together and fitted out to create an innovative new eco-hotel inside one of the country’s most popular national parks, offers a vision of revival and resilience at the beginning of another potentially active Atlantic hurricane season.

The containers exist as the elevated 24-room Flamingo Lodge at the exposed southern tip of Florida’s Everglades national park. It was built to replace the 1960s-era cinderblock construction that was finally demolished in 2009, four years after back-to-back hurricanes, Katrina and Wilma, tore it apart.

With the climate crisis fueling stronger and more frequent major hurricanes, which can push ahead of them devastating storm surges, many doubted if either the will or finance existed to bring a permanent lodging option back to the vulnerable area for the first time in almost 20 years.

But the determination to build it weathered further storms that delayed construction, a redrawing of plans, labor shortages, supply chain complications and the coronavirus pandemic.

Richard Luscombe