Things to Do in Key West: How Many Days in Key West Is Enough?

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The best things to do in Key West fit inside about one square mile. Fort Zachary Taylor has a Civil War fort and the best beach on the island, and one $6 fee covers everybody in the car. The Ernest Hemingway Home has the six-toed cats and the writing studio. Mallory Square has the sunset, and that one is free. You can walk between all three.

One piece of timing shapes the whole day. The fort closes at 5 p.m. The beach next to it stays open until sundown, per Florida State Parks. So do the fort in the morning, the sand after lunch, and Mallory Square at dusk. Two days covers Old Town properly. Three if you want the ferry out to the Dry Tortugas.

I have lost count of how many times I have been down here. Fifty, give or take, going back to when Key West was just the last stop on a boat trip. It is where the Overseas Highway gives up and there is water on both sides of the road. The island is small enough that you stop planning after the first day and start just walking, which is the right way to do it.

Quick facts

Things to Do in Key West Florida

Detail	What to know
Getting there	End of the Overseas Highway, about 3.5-4 hours from Miami by car
Best for	History, museums, beaches and a free sunset show
Cheapest real attraction	Fort Zachary Taylor, $6 per vehicle
Free options	Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square, the Southernmost Point, the cemetery
Splurge	Dry Tortugas ferry day trip, from $260 per adult
Getting around	Old Town is walkable; scooters, bikes and the tour train cover the rest
How long to stay	Two days for Old Town, three if you add the Dry Tortugas

Here is what everything costs, taken from each place’s own posted admission. One thing jumps out when you line them up. Every museum on the island charges between $17 and $24. So stop comparing them on price. Pick the ones you actually want to see, because the money is the same either way.

Stop	Adult price	Time to budget
Fort Zachary Taylor	$6 per vehicle, covers everyone in the car	2-3 hours
Key West Lighthouse	$17, or $15.50 booked online	45 minutes
Key West Shipwreck Treasure Museum	From $17.09	About 1 hour
Key West Aquarium	From $15.99	Under 1 hour
Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory	$17.50	45 minutes
Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum	$19	About 1 hour
Truman Little White House	From $24	About 1 hour
Ghosts and Gravestones tour	From $37.05	1 hour
Conch Tour Train	From $40.80	60 minutes
Dry Tortugas ferry day trip	From $260, includes park entry	Full day
Mallory Square Sunset Celebration	Free	About 1 hour

Map of Key West Attractions

Almost everything in this guide sits in the western third of the island. The map below marks all thirteen stops, numbered west to east in the order you would actually reach them, not in order of how good they are. Tap any number to see what is there. Use it to group a day by neighborhood, because criss-crossing this island in the heat is a waste of an afternoon.

#	Stop	Why it’s on the map
1	Mallory Square	The free nightly Sunset Celebration, on the harbor side
2	Key West Aquarium	Touch tank, shark feedings and rescued sea turtles
3	Key West Shipwreck Treasure Museum	Wrecking history and a 65-foot lookout tower
4	Mel Fisher Maritime Museum	Treasure recovered from two Spanish galleons
5	Duval Street	The island’s spine of bars, shops and restaurants
6	Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum	The writing studio and the six-toed cats
7	Key West Lighthouse	88 steps to the best view in Old Town
8	Truman Little White House	A working presidential retreat, kept as it was
9	Fort Zachary Taylor	The Civil War fort and the island’s best beach
10	Southernmost Point	The striped buoy, and the line that comes with it
11	Key West Cemetery	Free, quiet, and full of famously blunt headstones
12	Higgs Beach	Swimming, a pier and a sombre historic marker
13	Smathers Beach	The long sandy stretch out toward the airport

Best Things to Do in Key West

Almost everything worth doing here is packed into Old Town, and Old Town is about a mile across. Stops 1 through 11 on the map above are all within walking distance of one another. Three or four of them is an easy day on foot. Four is a full one.

The beaches run along the southern shore, so they are the natural afternoon. And then there is the ferry to the Dry Tortugas, which is the one thing here that does not fit into a day with anything else. It leaves early, it gets back late, and it eats the whole day. Only book it if you have three days on the island.

If you only have one or two, here is the order that works: fort and beach first, because both shut at sundown and you cannot move them. Museums in the middle of the day, when the sun is brutal and being indoors is a mercy. Sunset last, because it is free and it needs no booking.

Fort Zachary Taylor Beach Key West

This beach has actual sand. That sounds like a low bar until you have seen the rest of Key West, where most of the shoreline is hard coral rock and the sand that exists got trucked in. The water is calmer here too, because the beach sits inside a cove the old fort protects. It is the best swimming on the island and it is not particularly close.

Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park charges $6 per vehicle and that one fee covers everybody in the car, which makes it the cheapest thing on this whole page by a distance. Grounds open at 8 a.m. and stay open until sundown, per Florida State Parks. The fort closes at 5 p.m. The beach does not. Walk the fort first.

Two things to know before you go. There is no rental stand inside the park, so bring your own chairs, umbrella and snorkel gear or do without. And the parking lot is small. On a weekend in winter it fills before noon, and after that you are parking down the road and walking in.

Bring the kids here. The fort is enormous, and for a child who has never been inside one, that does all the work on its own. Brick casemates. Gun rooms. Ramparts you can walk along. I have never once had to talk a kid into it.

Adults who are sure they are not fort people come out having enjoyed it too, usually because nobody expects something this big and this intact for six dollars.

Then go straight to the sand. Fort in the morning while everyone still has energy, beach for the rest of the afternoon. Do it backwards and somebody ends up being rushed through a fort at ten to five.

Key West Lighthouse and Keeper’s Quarters

Eighty-eight steps and you are above every roof in Old Town. That is the whole pitch, and it is enough. There is no other spot on this island where you can see how small it really is, and the climb is short enough that most people manage it without much complaint.

Here is the part that makes it smart rather than just nice: the lighthouse stands directly across the street from the Hemingway House. Buy both, do them back to back, and from the top of the tower you look straight down into the Hemingway gardens. It is the best view of that property anyone gets without paying to go in.

Adults are $17, or $15.50 if you book online. Kids 7 to 18 are $9, under 7 free. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., last ticket 4:30, per the Key West Art & Historical Society. The keeper’s quarters at the base are included in the ticket, and most people walk past them to get to the stairs. Do not. They are the quiet half of the stop.

Hemingway House Key West Tour

You will walk straight past this place if nobody tells you where it is. From the street it is a six-foot brick wall with trees over the top, at 907 Whitehead Street, one block west of Duval. Nothing about it announces itself. That is the first thing worth knowing.

The second is the cats. Nearly sixty of them live on the grounds and about half have six toes, per the Hemingway Home & Museum. They all descend from a white six-toed cat a ship’s captain gave Hemingway, named Snow White. They sleep on the furniture, on the garden walls, in the middle of the footpaths, and they do not move for you. Kids who could not care less about a dead writer’s house care enormously about the cats.

Behind the wall is an 1851 house with wraparound balconies on both floors, the writing studio kept as it was, and a swimming pool Hemingway had dug in 1937 that was the first one in the Florida Keys. Adults $19, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day of the year. Tours run continuously from 9:15 and last 20 to 30 minutes, per the museum’s own rates page. Nothing to book, just turn up.

Skip it if your whole visit is three hours, or if the kids will not stand still through a house tour. Between walking there, the tour and the gift shop, this eats an hour.

Mel Fisher Maritime Museum

This is the one people mean when they talk about the gold. The museum is built around treasure recovered from the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita. Both were lost in a hurricane in 1622 and found off the Keys centuries later. It opens every day of the year at 10 a.m., with the last ticket sold at 4 p.m., per the museum’s own site.

The Atocha gold is what gets people in the door. The rest of it is why you should give the place a full hour. There is the wider 1622 fleet, the slave ship Henrietta Marie, and the wrecking trade that built this town in the first place, which is a stranger story than the treasure. Key West got rich for decades off ships breaking apart on the reef. That thread picks up again at the Shipwreck Treasure Museum two streets over, so do the two of them back to back and they make one story instead of two.

Key West Shipwreck Treasure Museum

You can pick up a real silver bar here, salvaged off a Spanish galleon. It sits on a stand with a hole cut in the top and you reach in and lift it. Everybody underestimates the weight. It is the one thing kids talk about afterwards, and honestly the adults do too.

Then climb the tower. The building has a 65-foot Captain’s Observatory on the roof and the view runs out over the harbor. That is not decoration, it is the point of the whole museum: wreckers built towers like this one, some of them over 90 feet, purely to spot a ship breaking up on the reef before the competition did. First boat out got the biggest share of the salvage. You are standing in the machinery of that business.

The story the place tells is the Isaac Allerton, which went down in shallow water off the Keys in 1856 and was not found again until 1985. Costumed staff work the floor. It sounds like a gimmick and mostly it is not. Tickets from $17.09, open daily 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., last entry at 5.

Key West Aquarium Tickets

Set your expectations right and this one is a pleasure. It is small. Old, too. And it is not a big glass modern aquarium, nor is it pretending to be one. You walk through it in well under an hour, which is exactly why it works: do the aquarium, then walk fifty yards to Mallory Square for the sunset.

Inside are more than 250 fish and sharks and four sea turtles. Two of the turtles, Lola and Rocky, swim with prosthetic flippers. There is a touch tank, which makes this the easiest stop on this entire page for a small child.

Time your visit around a feeding. Guided presentations run about every 30 minutes and the shark and turtle feeds are the ones worth planning for. Turn up at a random moment and you have seen a small aquarium. Turn up for a feeding and you have seen a show. Tickets from $15.99, at 1 Whitehead Street.

Truman Little White House Tour

There is a poker table in this house that was built to Truman’s own specification, and a bar he stocked himself. On the desk in the living room sits the sign that says the buck stops here. That desk is where he worked, and the tour makes the case that some of his more important speeches were written in that room.

What makes it land is that almost nothing has been staged. The furnishings are the originals. You are walking through a house a president actually lived and worked in for 175 days across 1946 to 1952, not a reconstruction of one behind a rope line.

And he was not the only one. Franklin Roosevelt stayed here first, back in 1932. Eisenhower came to recover after his heart attack in 1956. Kennedy spent 45 days in the place. Carter and Clinton both used it later. Thomas Edison had already lived in it during the First World War, decades before any of them.

Tours are $24 and it opens daily 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Guided only, so you go at the guide’s pace. That is the right format for this house and the wrong one for a restless group. If your people tend to drift after twenty minutes, send them to the lighthouse or the Shipwreck Treasure Museum instead and come back here on your own.

Best Beaches in Key West

Nobody warns you about this, so here it is: Key West is a poor beach island. That sounds wrong for somewhere surrounded by that water, but the shoreline here is hard coral rock, not sand. Most of the sand you will walk on got trucked in and put there. The beaches are narrow and they are man-made.

Three are still worth your afternoon, and they are not interchangeable.

Fort Zachary Taylor, number 9 on the map, is the best of them by a wide margin. Real sand, calmer water because of the cove, and actual shade from the pines. If you only do one beach, do this one.

Higgs Beach, number 12, is the easy one. Parking is simple, there is a pier to walk out on, and it sits close enough to Old Town to reach on foot. It also holds the African Cemetery Memorial, which marks the burial site of refugees taken off intercepted slave ships. That is a sobering thing to come across between a swim and a sandwich, and it is worth stopping at rather than walking past.

Smathers Beach, number 13, is the long one out toward the airport. It has the most sand and the most rental stands. It also has almost no natural shade at all, so bring an umbrella or you will be cooked by two o’clock.

Southernmost Point Buoy

The striped concrete buoy at the corner of Whitehead and South streets is the island’s most photographed object, and it is completely free. It marks the southernmost point of the continental United States. Expect a line, especially between mid-morning and late afternoon in high season.

Go at sunrise if the photograph matters to you. The line is often non-existent before about 8 a.m., the light is better, and you will not be rushed by the twenty people waiting behind you. It is a five-minute stop either way, so build it around something else nearby rather than making a trip of it.

Set your expectations honestly before you walk down there, because this is the stop people are most often surprised by. It is a buoy. A big painted concrete buoy on a street corner, with the ocean behind it. That is the entire attraction. You go, you take your picture, you read the lettering, and ten minutes later you are done and looking for the next thing.

That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason not to plan around it. Treat it as a stop on the way to somewhere else rather than a destination, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. Whitehead and South is a short walk from the Hemingway House and the lighthouse, and Fort Zachary Taylor is not much further, so it slots into an Old Town morning without costing you anything but the line.

Mallory Square Sunset Celebration Key West

This is the one I tell people not to skip. The Sunset Celebration is a nightly arts festival on the waterfront, and it starts about an hour before sunset, per its own organizers. It is free. Unapologetically touristy, too. But it is still the best evening in the Keys that costs nothing at all.

What makes it work is that it is not one show. It is dozens of them, running at once along the same stretch of waterfront. Expect jugglers, unicyclists, high-wire acts and sword swallowers. Musicians, mimes and storytellers work the gaps between them. The act most people remember afterwards is the trained cats jumping through flaming hoops. Mallory Square’s own history credits Tennessee Williams with starting the tradition.

The food carts are part of the draw. Last time I walked it, one was selling conch fritters, and a woman had turned a bicycle into a mobile bakery and was working the crowd with homemade cookies. The artists are worth slowing down for too. Photographers and painters sell work straight off folding tables. There is usually a caricaturist who will draw you as a cartoon while you wait. Arts and crafts exhibitors and a few psychics fill in the rest of the square.

Arrive 30 to 45 minutes early if you want an unobstructed water view. The walkway fills fast once the sky starts to color. Keep a backup plan for rain, because performers and crowds thin out quickly if a squall rolls through. That happens often in the wetter summer months.

Key West Sunset Cruise

The other way to do sunset is from the water, looking back at the island instead of out from it. Boats leave the harbor near Mallory Square most evenings, and the choice is really between two different nights out. Big catamarans with an open bar and a hundred people on them. Or a small schooner carrying two dozen, under actual sail, quiet. Decide which of those you want before you look at prices, because they are not the same product.

Then compare two or three operators rather than booking the first listing you find. What is included swings the price more than the boat does.

One thing that catches people out. Departure is set by the sunset, not the clock, and sunset in Key West moves by more than an hour across the year. So check the actual time for your date when you book, and remember boarding usually starts 30 to 45 minutes before that.

Key West Snorkeling Trips

The only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States sits a few miles off this island, and catamarans run out to it every day. A half day is the standard trip, gear usually included, often with a second stop thrown in.

Now the part the booking pages will not tell you. That reef is several miles offshore and the ride out is fully exposed. There is no land between you and the weather. If anybody in your group gets seasick, book the morning departure without debating it, because the water is almost always calmer before the afternoon breeze builds up. An afternoon boat in a chop is a long two hours for someone who is suffering.

Operators set their own prices and their own cancellation terms, and those terms matter more here than they do on land. Confirm both directly before you pay.

Conch Tour Train and Trolley

Take this on your first morning or do not take it at all. That is the whole verdict. An hour on the train while you still have no idea where anything is will save you a day of wandering, because you come off it knowing roughly where Duval runs, where the fort is, and what all those side streets are.

Ride it on day three and you will already know everything it tells you.

It is also the honest answer for anyone in the group who cannot manage heat or distance on foot. Old Town is walkable if you are up for it. In August, with a bad knee, it is not.

From $40.80, a 60-minute narrated loop, departures every 30 minutes between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Tickets include two guided walking tours and a map. It shuts on the last Saturday in October for Fantasy Fest, so do not build a plan around that date.

Key West Ghost Tours

Here is the thing to know before you hand over any money, because the name misleads almost everybody. Ghosts and Gravestones does not go to the cemetery. It works through haunted buildings instead, including Captain Tony’s Saloon and a stop inside the Shipwreck Treasure Museum after hours, which is the best part of it.

So if what you pictured was walking between headstones after dark, this is not that tour, and no tour on the island is. The cemetery closes at dusk. Walk it yourself in daylight, free, and read on for what is actually in there.

Taken for what it is, it is better than it sounds. Key West leans hard into the haunted thing and the guides commit to it properly. From $37.05, about an hour, boarding at the Conch Tour Train Depot at 501 Front Street on the corner of Front and Duval.

Duval Street Bars Key West

Duval Street runs the width of the island, from the harbor end near Mallory Square down to the Atlantic shore. It is the island’s commercial spine and it changes character completely along its length. The northern end is dense with bars, T-shirt shops and street noise. The southern end is where US 1 finally runs out, and the Mile 0 sign a block off Duval marks it. Walk south and it thins into galleries, quieter cafés and residential blocks.

Sloppy Joe’s is the famous one, trading on its Hemingway association. Captain Tony’s, around the corner, occupies the bar’s original location and is the more atmospheric room of the two. Beyond those, walk a few blocks past the busiest stretch before choosing anywhere. Crowding and prices both ease within a couple of hundred yards.

The bars get the attention, but the shopping is the part I actually build time around. Walking Duval and looking at the shops is something you do for at least part of one day on any trip here. There are hundreds of them. T-shirt places, jewelry counters, art galleries, sunglasses, hot sauce, cigars, shell everything — honestly, anything you can imagine is for sale somewhere on that street. The browse itself is the attraction, not any one store in it.

Budget half a day if you want to do it properly, and do it in the morning or the late afternoon. The middle of the day on Duval is hot, shadeless and busy. The shops nearest the harbor end are the most crowded and the most aggressively touristy; the ones further south get calmer, and the galleries down that way are noticeably better than the T-shirt racks up top.

Where to Eat in Key West

Eat the local things first: conch fritters, a Cuban mix sandwich, fresh-caught hogfish, and key lime pie that is pale yellow rather than green. Anything bright green has food coloring in it, which is the quickest test of whether a place is cooking for tourists or for the island.

Key West’s restaurant scene turns over fast, and that is worth stating plainly. While researching this guide we checked two long-standing names readers still ask about. Señor Frog’s on Duval is closed. So is the Waffle House on North Roosevelt Boulevard. Directory sites and old travel posts still show them as open. So confirm anywhere you are counting on before you build an evening around it, particularly outside the peak winter season when hours contract.

Best Place to Eat in Key West

I have been coming here for a long time, and most of the places I used to eat at are gone. That turnover is the whole problem with restaurant recommendations for this island, so here is the rule I now use instead of a list: eat at whatever has survived the longest. In a town where the average kitchen lasts a few seasons, decades of trading is the only review that means anything.

By that test, Sloppy Joe’s is the answer on Duval. The bar opened on 5 December 1933 and moved to its 201 Duval Street corner on 5 May 1937, where it has traded ever since, according to the bar’s own history. Nothing else on that street comes close to that run. Yes, it is famous, it is busy, and it leans on the Hemingway connection harder than it needs to. It has also fed people continuously through most of a century, which is not nothing. Go at lunch rather than at night if you want to hear yourself think, and order the conch fritters or a fish sandwich rather than anything ambitious.

Pepe’s Cafe Key West

If you want older still, you have to come off Duval. Pepe’s Cafe at 806 Caroline Street dates to 1909 and bills itself as the oldest eating house in Key West. It is a small, plain, genuinely local breakfast room a couple of blocks off the tourist strip, and it is the better meal of the two. Breakfast there and lunch at Sloppy Joe’s is about as close as this island gets to a guaranteed day of eating.

Beyond those two, order by dish rather than by name. The four things listed at the top of this section are on enough menus island-wide that you will never go hungry waiting for one specific address to still be trading. And check opening hours the same week you travel, because half this island quietly shortens its days in the late summer.

Scooter Rental Key West

Old Town is compact enough that most visitors never need a car once they arrive. Scooters, mopeds and electric golf carts are rented all over the island, and bicycles are cheaper still and better suited to the flat streets and low speed limits.

Key West Scooter Rental Rules and Deposits

A few things worth knowing before renting. Parking in Old Town is metered and genuinely scarce, which is the main argument for leaving a car at the hotel. Scooter rental typically requires a valid driver’s license and a credit card deposit, and rates shift sharply between low and high season. Insurance is usually offered separately, so read what the deposit actually covers.

The scooters are worth it, and I do not say that about many rentals. My mother rode them here in her sixties and again in her seventies, and decades later she still brings it up. That is the endorsement I trust more than my own. Riding one is not a young person’s activity on this island, because nothing here is far and nothing here is fast.

Here is the part that actually makes the difference: get off the busy streets. Duval and Roosevelt are for getting places. The quieter residential blocks are where a scooter turns into something worth doing. You roll slowly past conch houses in every color anyone has ever painted a house, gingerbread trim, yards thick with palms and bougainvillea. You see how people here actually live, which is a different island from the tourist strip, and you cover far more of it than you would on foot.

Do it safely and it is the best few hours of the trip. Helmets, daylight, no drinking beforehand, and stay off the main roads until you are comfortable on the thing. Key West traffic is slow but it is full of distracted people looking at buildings instead of the road, and you should assume you are invisible to every one of them.

Unusual Things to Do in Key West

The Key West Cemetery is free, it is in the middle of Old Town, and it is funnier than any paid attraction on this page. Headstones here are famously blunt. The one everybody comes to find belongs to B.P. Roberts, and it reads simply that she told you she was sick. Others run to hobbies, in-laws and one very pointed opinion of the living.

The vaults sit above ground because you cannot dig into coral rock, which is the same reason this island has no basements. It opened in 1846 and was laid out for about 15,000 graves. Best estimates now put the number buried here somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000, which tells you how long they kept finding room.

Walk past the jokes and it turns serious fast. There is a plot of sailors killed when the USS Maine blew up in 1898, and a section for Cuban dead from the Ten Years War that the Republic of Cuba owns to this day. Give it half an hour in daylight. It shuts at dusk.

Key West Pawn Shops

The pawn shops are the island’s genuinely underrated browse, and they are the thing I recommend most that nobody expects. Key West has a long history of salvage, treasure hunting and transient wealth, and the resale shops reflect that in a way chain souvenir stores never will.

What struck me the first time was the range. You get islandy stuff sitting next to cheap radios, tools, instruments, jewelry, dive gear, all of it on the same shelves. A genuinely weird gamut of things I would not have expected to find in a pawn shop, and most of it priced low. I have never gone in looking for anything specific. It was just neat to see, and neat to see how well those shops were doing compared to what you would guess from the outside.

Go in with no shopping list and give yourself twenty minutes. If you find something, good; if not, you have still seen a side of the island that the Duval gift shops do not show you. Finally, the waterfront’s historic Custom House, in its distinctive red brick, is the building most people photograph without ever going in.

Dry Tortugas Ferry From Key West

Seventy miles west of here there is a fort sitting by itself in open ocean, and no road goes to it. The National Park Service is blunt about that: no bridges, no causeway, boat or seaplane only. That is the entire appeal. You cannot drive up to Fort Jefferson the way you can drive up to everything else on this page.

The Yankee Freedom ferry starts at $260 an adult, which sounds steep until you see what is in it. Park entry, a box lunch, snorkel gear and a guided tour of the fort are all included, per the operator’s ticket page. So the real cost of the day is not the money. It is the day.

This eats one completely. Early out, late back, nothing else happening. Only do it if you have three days on the island, and book it weeks ahead because the operator warns it sells out in season. If you are here for one day, leave it. It will still be there next time, and our Dry Tortugas day trip guide has the crossing and the packing list for when you go.

Things to Do in Key West on a Budget

Free Things to Do in Key West

You can have a genuinely good day here and spend nothing. The sunset at Mallory Square is free. So is the cemetery, the Southernmost Point, and walking Duval and the harborfront. Add Fort Zachary Taylor at $6 for the whole car and you have a full day for the price of a sandwich.

The thing that quietly drains a budget is parking. Old Town’s private lots and garages charge by the hour and it stacks up fast across three or four days. Leave the car wherever you are staying and walk, because you will not need it once you are here anyway.

And if you have kids, check the age brackets before you buy. The lighthouse is free under 7. Butterfly Conservatory tickets drop to $12.50 for ages 4 to 12. At the Hemingway House it is $7 for ages 6 to 12. On a family of four those gaps are bigger than the adult price difference between the museums.

Best Thing to Do in Key West With Kids

It depends entirely on the age, and the split is sharper than you would think.

Small children want the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory. It is a warm glasshouse full of free-flying butterflies and they land on people, which does the job on its own. Your ticket lets you walk back through as many times as you want that day, per the conservatory’s own visitor information, so a four-year-old can do three short laps instead of one long one. Adults $17.50, open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with last entry at 4:30. It is indoors and air-conditioned, which also makes it the best rainy-afternoon save on the island.

Older kids want the Shipwreck Treasure Museum, because you can pick things up and climb things there. Lifting that silver bar and going up the 65-foot tower beats any house tour, and it is not close.

And for any age, Fort Zachary Taylor. A fort that big does not need explaining to a child.

Things to Do in Key West for 1 Day

One day is enough for a good day here, as long as you do not try to buy everything. Here is the order I would give anyone.

Morning at Fort Zachary Taylor. Walk the fort, then the beach, and you have already done the best thing on the island before lunch. Early afternoon, when the sun is at its worst, go indoors: the lighthouse and the Hemingway House sit across the street from each other and fill a couple of hours between them. Late afternoon, walk Duval. Then Mallory Square for the sunset, which costs nothing and needs no booking.

Three things not to do on a single day. Do not book the Dry Tortugas ferry, because it is the whole day and rushing it wastes the money. Do not bring the car into Old Town, because everything above is walkable and you will pay to park it twice. And do not build your only sunset around a dinner reservation, because a table that runs fifteen minutes late costs you the one thing here you cannot reschedule.

Things to Book in Key West

Two things need booking ahead. The Dry Tortugas ferry, which sells out weeks in advance in season. And a sunset sail if you want one on a weekend, because the good small boats fill first and what is left is the party catamaran.

That is it. Everything else on this page you can walk up to on the day, and I would rather you did. Over-booking Key West is the most common way to have a worse time here, because the island rewards drifting and punishes schedules.

If you want one anchor to build around, make it Fort Zachary Taylor. Beach, fort, the lowest price on the page, and it has to be early because the gates close at sundown. Everything else arranges itself around that.

Prices are approximate, current as of publication, and change frequently — confirm the latest price with the park, operator or provider before you go.

Key West is the end of the drive, and the Florida Keys trip planning page has every stop before it. Before you get there, Key Largo or Islamorada makes a better first night, and Bahia Honda is the beach stop on the way.

Frequently asked questions about things to do in Key West

What is the number one thing to do in Key West?

Fort Zachary Taylor is the best single stop for most visitors, combining a real sand beach with a Civil War-era fort for $6 per vehicle, per Florida State Parks.

Is Mallory Square free?

Yes, the nightly Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square is free to attend and needs no reservation or ticket.

How many days in Key West is enough?

Two full days cover the main Old Town attractions comfortably. Add a third if you want the Dry Tortugas ferry, since that trip takes an entire day on its own.

Where can you find gold treasure in Key West?

The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum holds treasure recovered from the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita. The Shipwreck Treasure Museum nearby lets visitors lift a genuine salvaged silver bar.

How many steps is the Key West Lighthouse?

88 steps to the top of the tower, per the Key West Art & Historical Society. The lighthouse is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily with last admission at 4:30 p.m.

Is the Key West Cemetery self-guided?

The Ghosts and Gravestones tour visits haunted buildings including Captain Tony’s Saloon rather than stopping at the cemetery. The Key West Cemetery itself is free to walk during daylight hours.

Do you need a car in Key West?

Not once you are there. The Old Town attractions sit within walking or biking distance of each other. You will still want a car for the drive down, which we cover in our Miami to Key West road trip itinerary.

Is Key West worth visiting after Key Largo?

Key West is still worth the drive after Key Largo. It is a different kind of stop, built around walkable history and museums, so it complements a reef day like the one in our guide to what a John Pennekamp snorkeling trip costs rather than duplicating it.

Updated September 22, 2026.