"In its natural state, most of Florida was such a soggy mush of low-lying marshes that mapmakers couldn’t decide whether to draw it as land or water."

"The Spaniards who arrived in the 16th century told their king the peninsula was 'liable to overflow, and of no use,' and white people mostly stayed away until the U.S. Army chased the Seminole Indians into the Everglades in the 19th century. The soldiers forced to slog through its mosquito-infested bogs described it as a 'hideous,' 'diabolical,''repulsive,' 'pestilential,' 'God-abandoned' hellhole. The story of Florida in the 20th century is about dreamers and schemers trying to get rid of all that water and drain the swamp. Eventually, they mostly succeeded, transforming a remote wilderness into a sprawling megalopolis, replacing millions of acres of wetlands with strip malls and golf courses and sprawling subdivisions, building the Palmetto and Sawgrass Expressways where palmettos and sawgrass used to be.... Cape Coral is Florida on steroids, a comically artificial landscape featuring seven perfectly rectangular man-made islands and eight perfectly square man-made lakes. It was built by two shady brothers who made their fortunes selling scammy anti-baldness tonics, then used their talent for flimflam to sell inaccessible swampland to suckers.... 'You can even get stucco,' the land-swindler played by Groucho Marx quipped in Cocoanuts. 'Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!'"

Writes Michael Grunwald in "Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality/Cape Coral is a microcosm of Florida’s worst impulse: selling dream homes in a hurricane-prone flood zone. But people still want them" (The Atlantic).