Brochure images of tanning flesh and Mickey Mouse give an inaccurate and incomplete picture of FLORIDA . Although the aptly nicknamed "Sunshine State" is indeed devoted to the tourist trade, it's also among the least-understood parts of the US. Away from its overexposed resorts lie forests and rivers, deserted strands filled with wildlife, vibrant cities and primeval swamps.

In many respects Florida is still evolving. Seven hundred people a day move to the state, now the fourth most populous in the nation. Changing demographics are eroding the traditional Deep South conservatism: the new Floridians tend to be a younger, more energetic breed, while Spanish-speaking enclaves provide close ties to Latin America and the Caribbean - links as influential in creating wealth as the recent arrival of the movie industry in central Florida, fresh from Hollywood.

The essential stop is cosmopolitan, half-Latin Miami , from where a simple journey south brings you to the Florida Keys , a hundred-mile string of islands known for sports fishing, coral-reef diving, and the sultry town of Key West , legendary for its sunsets and anything-goes attitude. North from Miami, much of the east coast is disappointingly urbanized, albeit with miles of unbroken beaches flowing alongside. The residential stranglehold is lessened further north, where communities such as Daytona Beach have become subservient to the local sands. Farther along, historical St Augustine stands as the longest continuous settlement in the US.

In central Florida the terrain turns green, though it's no rural idyll: this is where you'll find Orlando and Walt Disney World , one of the world's leading tourist destinations. From here it's just a skip north to the forests of the Panhandle , Florida's link with the Deep South, or to the towns and beaches of the west coast . To the south, and also easily accessible from Miami, stretches the Everglades, a swampy sawgrass plain filled with camera-friendly (but otherwise unfriendly) alligators.

In at least one way it makes little difference when you visit : warm sunshine and blue skies are almost always a fact of life. Florida does, however, split into two climatic zones : subtropical in the south and warm temperate in the north. Orlando and points south have very mild winters (October to April), with warm temperatures and low humidity. This is the peak tourist season, when prices are at their highest. The southern summer (May to September), on the other hand, brings high humidity and afternoon storms - the rewards for braving the mugginess are lower prices and fewer tourists. Winter is the off-peak period north of Orlando; while snow has been known to fall in the Panhandle, daytime temperatures are generally comfortably warm. During the northern Florida summer, the crowds arrive, and the days - and the nights - get hot and sticky. Also, there is a potentially ominous time of the year - the " hurricane season " - June to November.

Finally, although Florida has struggled with its reputation for crimes against (and even murders of) tourists, the state's been very successful in reducing such attacks. It's definitely no longer the den of "Miami Vice" it once was, but, as when visiting all big cities, it pays to be wary.  TOP

Florida's railroads were built to service boomtowns in the Twenties, and consequently some rural nooks are well-linked. Amtrak runs west from Jacksonville via New Orleans all the way to LA, while connections with New York are good. However, in some areas Amtrak buses have replaced the trains; these can be very expensive, so check in advance. Passengers with cars can use the daily Auto Train from Lorton, Virginia (just south of Washington, DC), to Sanford, north of Orlando. The southeast coast boasts an elevated TriRail system that ferries commuters between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and Palm Beach.

Although inadvisable in the cities, cycling is a great way to see large parts of Florida - miles of cycle paths follow the coast, and long-distance bike trails cross the state's interior. Forget hitching : always dangerous (especially for women), it's illegal in Miami (where you'd be lucky to live to regret it) and on the outskirts of many other cities.  TOP

The first European sighting of Florida, just six years after Christopher Columbus reached the New World, is believed to have been made by John and Sebastian Cabot in 1498, when they spotted what is now Cape Florida, on Key Biscayne in Miami. At the time, the area's 100,000 inhabitants formed several distinct tribes : the Timucua across northern Florida, the Calusa around the southwest and Lake Okeechobee, the Apalachee in the Panhandle and the Tequesta along the southeast coast.

In 1513, a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León , sighted land during Pascua Florida , the Festival of the Flowers, and named what he saw La Florida - or "Land of Flowers." Eight years later he returned with a mandate from the Spanish king to conquer and colonize the territory, the first of several Spanish incursions prompted by rumors of gold hidden in the north of the region. When it became clear that Florida did not harbor stunning riches, interest waned; but the arrival of French Huguenots in 1562 forced the Spanish into a more determined effort at settlement. Three years later, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St Augustine - the longest continuous site of European habitation on the continent. In 1586 St Augustine was razed by a British naval bombardment led by Francis Drake. The ensuing bloody confrontation for control of North America was eventually settled when the British captured the crucial Spanish possession of Havana, and Spain willingly parted with Florida to get it back. By this time, indigenous Floridians had been largely wiped out by disease. Florida's Native American population now largely comprised disparate tribes arriving from the west, collectively known as the Seminoles , who were generally left undisturbed in the inland areas.

Following American independence, when Florida was returned to Spain, the US began to think in terms of controlling the state. In 1814 a US general, Andrew Jackson, marched south, killing hundreds of Indians and triggering the First Seminole War - on the pretext of subduing the Seminole but with the actual intention of taking the region. Spain formally ceded Florida to the US in 1819, with Jackson sworn in as Florida's first American governor and Tallahassee selected as the new administrative center. Eleven years later, the Act of Indian Removal decreed that all Native Americans in the eastern US should be transferred to reservations in the Midwest. Most Seminole were determined to stay and the Second Seminole War broke out, with the Indians steadily driven south, away from the fertile lands of central Florida and into the Everglades, where they eventually agreed to remain.

Florida became a state on March 3, 1845, coinciding with the prosperity brought by the railroads. As a member of the Confederacy during the Civil War , Florida's primary contribution was the provision of food - a foretaste of its postwar economic role after being readmitted to the Union. As northern speculators began to invest in Florida, the country's newspapers extolled the curative virtues of its climate. These early efforts to promote Florida as a tourist destination brought in the wintering rich: Henry Flagler opened luxury resorts on the northeast coast and extended his Florida East Coast Railroad south, giving birth to communities such as Palm Beach. Henry Plant connected his own railroad to Tampa, turning it into a thriving port city. Florida's climate enabled citrus fruits to be grown during the winter and sold to the cooler north, and the state became a major beef producer. After World War I, it seemed that everyone in America wanted a piece of Florida, and chartered trains brought in thousands of eager buyers. But most deals were on paper only, and in 1926 the banks began to default. The Wall Street Crash then made paupers of the millionaires whose investments had helped shape the state.

What saved Florida was World War II . Thousands of troops arrived to guard the coastline, empty tourist hotels provided ready-made barracks, and - most importantly - the soldiers got a taste of Florida that would entice many of them to return. In the mid-Sixties, the state government bent over backward to help the Disney Corporation turn a sizable slice of central Florida into Walt Disney World , the biggest theme park ever known. Its enormous commercial success helped solidify Florida's place in the international tourist market: directly or indirectly, tourism makes up 20 percent of the total state economy.

Behind the optimistic facade, however, lie many problems . There's a broadening gap between the relative liberalism of the big cities and the arch-conservatism of the rural Bible Belt: while Miami promotes its multicultural makeup, the Ku Klux Klan holds picnics in the Panhandle. Gun laws remain notoriously lax, and the multimillion-dollar drug trade shows few signs of abating - at least a quarter of the cocaine entering the US is said to arrive via Florida. Racial issues continue, too, with tension on several fronts: between Anglo-Americans and nouveau riche Cubans, blacks and whites, blacks and Hispanics, police and the inner-city poor. However, increased protection of the state's natural resources has been a more positive feature of the last decade and impressive amounts of land are under state control - overall, wildlife is less threatened now than at any time since white settlers first arrived.

The 2000 presidential election fiasco brought unwelcome attention to the state. Both Gov. George Bush of Texas (Republican) and Vice President Al Gore (Democrat) needed Florida's 25 electoral votes to win. Bush led by a few hundred votes on the morning after the election in unofficial returns. For five weeks top lawyers on both slides slugged it out in the courts. Disputes raged over such issues as whether ballots with "hanging chads" (partially punched out holes) should be counted. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively halted the recounts, and Bush won the state by 537 votes out of some six million cast.  TOP

Central Florida
Encompassing a broad and fertile expanse between the east and west coasts, most of central Florida was farming country when vacation-mania first struck the beachside strips. From the 1970s on, this picture of tranquility was shattered: no section of the state has been affected more dramatically by modern tourism, and the most visited part of Florida can also be one of the ugliest. A clutter of freeway interchanges, motels and billboards arches around the small city of Orlando , where a tourist-dollar chase of Gold Rush magnitude was sparked by Walt Disney World , the biggest and cleverest theme-park complex ever created. The rest of central Florida is quiet by comparison, and, north of Orlando particularly, rural towns like Ocala typify the state before the arrival of the highways and of vacations spun around "attractions."

East Coast
Florida's east coast , facing the Atlantic Ocean, runs for more than three hundred miles north from the northern fringe of Miami. The palm-dotted beaches and warm ocean waves bring to reality the sun-soaked playground of popular imagination. However, the first fifty or so miles lie deep within the sway of Miami, with one city offering little to distinguish it from the next. Despite its outdated party-town reputation, Fort Lauderdale these days is a sophisticated yachting center. Boca Raton and Palm Beach to the north are even more exclusive, their Mediterranean-Revival mansions inhabited almost exclusively by multimillionaires. North of here, the coast is still substantially unspoiled, although the Space Coast , centering on the Kennedy Space Center , and Daytona Beach both go all out to draw the crowds. The one genuinely characterful town in the entire stretch is St Augustine , still recognizable as the spot where Spanish settlers established North America's earliest foreign colony.

By car, the scenic route along the coast is Hwy-A1A , which sticks to the ocean side of the Intracoastal Waterway , formed when the rivers dividing the mainland from the barrier islands were joined and deepened during World War II.

Florida Keys
Fiction, films and folklore have given the FLORIDA KEYS - a hundred-mile chain of islands that runs to within ninety miles of Cuba - an image of glamorous intrigue they don't really deserve. Instead, this is an outdoor-lover's paradise, where fishing, snorkeling and diving dominate. Terrific untainted natural areas include the Florida Reef , a great band of living coral just a few miles off the coast. But for many, the various keys are only stops on the way to fascinating Key West . Once the richest town in the US, and the final dot of North America before a thousand miles of ocean, Key West has lush, Caribbean-style streets with plenty of congenial bars in which to waste away the hours, watching the famous spectacular sunsets.

Wherever you are on the Keys, you'll experience distinctive cuisine , served for the most part in funky little shacks where the food is fresh and the atmosphere laid-back. Conch, a rich meaty mollusc, is a specialty, served in chowders and fritters. And as for the Key Lime Pie, the delicate, creamy concoction of limes and condensed milk bears little resemblance here to the lurid green imposters served in the rest of the country.

Traveling through the Keys could hardly be easier. There's just one route all the way through to Key West: the Overseas Highway (US-1 ). The road is punctuated by mile markers (MM) - starting with MM127 just south of Miami and finishing with MM0 in Key West.

Panhandle
Rubbing hard against Alabama in the west and Georgia in the north, the long, narrow Panhandle has much more in common with the states of the Deep South than with the rest of Florida, and city sophisticates have countless jokes lampooning the folksy lifestyles of the people here. Hard to credit, then, that just a century ago, the Panhandle was Florida. At the western edge, Pensacola was a busy port when Miami was still a swamp. Fertile soils lured wealthy plantation owners south and helped establish Tallahassee as a high-society gathering place and administrative center - a role which, as the state capital, it retains. But the decline of cotton, the chopping down of too many trees, and the coming of the East Coast railroad eventually left the Panhandle high and dry. Much of the inland region still seems neglected, and the Apalachicola Forest is perhaps the best place in Florida to disappear into the wilderness. The coastal Panhandle , on the other hand, is enjoying better times and, despite rows of hotels, much is still untainted, with miles of blindingly white sands.

West Coast
In three hundred miles from the state's southern tip to the border of the Panhandle, Florida's west coast embraces all the extremes. Buzzing, youthful towns rise behind placid fishing hamlets; mobbed holiday strips are just minutes from desolate swamplands. Surprises are plentiful, though the coast's one constant is proximity to the Gulf of Mexico - and sunset views rivaled only by those of the Florida Keys.

The largest city, Tampa , has more to offer than its corporate towers initially suggest - not least the exemplary nightlife scene at Cuban Ybor City and the Busch Gardens theme park. For the mass of visitors, though, the Tampa Bay area begins and ends with the St Petersburg beaches , whose miles of sea and sand are undiluted vacation territory. South of Tampa, a string of barrier-island beaches runs the length of the Gulf, and the mainland towns that provide access to them - such as Sarasota and Fort Myers - have enough to warrant a stop. Inland, the wilderness of the Everglades National Park is explorable on simple walking trails, by canoeing, or by spending the night at backcountry campgrounds with only the gators for company.  TOP