Flamingo Lodge

Flamingo Lodge is a 24-room hotel beside Florida Bay, at the southern end of Everglades National Park. It makes sense if you want to spend the night in Flamingo and head out for boating, paddling, fishing, hiking or birding. Flamingo is 38 miles south of the Homestead entrance, so this is a remote base, not a quick hop from town. A park entrance pass or fee is required to get here.

The rooms sit in raised buildings across the lodge campus. Check in at the shared restaurant and front-desk building first; the broad campus pin can put you at the wrong building.

Choose a studio, one-bedroom suite or two-bedroom suite. Every room has a full bath, kitchenette and balcony facing Florida Bay. The kitchenette includes a two-burner cooktop, microwave, coffee maker, dishwasher and refrigerator, which is handy this far from town. Four rooms are listed as ADA accessible with roll-in showers. The front desk and restaurant have elevator or ramp access, with a walkway onward to the rooms.

The adjacent restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, and there’s a bar and a retail area by the front desk. That gives overnight guests a meal option on site; the available information doesn’t point to a particular signature dish.

This is the modern replacement for Flamingo’s earlier lodge, a Mission 66 project built between 1959 and 1966. The older property grew to more than 100 rooms and cabins and served as the park’s main hotel for nearly four decades. Hurricanes damaged the former lodge and visitor-center buildings in 2005 and 2017. The current lodge reopened in 2023, with its rooms built in raised, container-style structures designed with storm and sea-level resilience in mind.

The east-facing balconies look toward Florida Bay, and the waterfront setting is a big part of staying here. Manatees are sometimes seen near the lodge. Mosquitoes are a recurring nuisance, especially in hot, wet weather, so bring repellent if you plan to spend much time on the balcony or outside. Guest reports on room comfort and service vary, so the clearest reasons to choose this stay are its location inside the park and the bay-side rooms.