An Afternoon at Lovers Key

There is no shortcut to the sand at Lovers Key. You park, you pay at the station on Estero Boulevard, and then you walk — over a wooden bridge, past a tidal creek, until the mangroves finally open and the Gulf is just there in front of you. On a Sunday afternoon in late June, that walk was the best part of the day.

The park sits at 8700 Estero Blvd., on the barrier island between Fort Myers Beach and Bonita Springs. It is run by Florida State Parks, and it is open every day of the year from 8 a.m. until sundown. Admission is $8 for a vehicle carrying two to eight people, $4 if you are driving alone or riding a motorcycle, and $2 if you arrive on foot or by bicycle.

From parking lot 1 there are two ways across to the beach, and both of them are on your own two feet. The Mid-Beach wood bridge is roughly a thousand feet. The South Beach concrete bridge is about half a mile. The tram that used to carry people over has been discontinued, so whatever you want on the sand — chairs, shade, water, a cooler — you are carrying it the whole way.

It is not a hardship. The bridge is wide and flat, and it crosses the part of the park most people never slow down for: an inner waterway of shallow green channels and mangrove islands, with Estero Bay opening out to one side and the condo towers of the mainland standing very small in the distance.

Below the rail, the creeks run clear over pale sand. Live mangroves push in from one bank; on the other, bare grey branches are still standing where storms stripped them. The park has more than seven miles of trails, including the 2.5-mile Black Island Trail and the 1.1-mile Eagle Trail, and from the bridge you get the short, free version of all of it.

The reveal comes late and all at once. One moment you are still among the trees; the next the railing drops away and there is white sand running out to green water, with a scatter of umbrellas along the tideline.

The beach here is about two miles of protected Gulf shore, and in late June, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, it did not feel crowded. Groups had spread themselves out with a comfortable amount of sand between them. Swimming is allowed and there are restrooms in the park, but there is no natural shade at all on the open beach — every canopy you see, somebody carried across that bridge.

The water was warm and the break was small, the kind you can stand in and talk over. Behind the dune line, the lagoon sat almost still, mangroves leaning out over it, a separate and much quieter body of water a hundred steps from the surf.