The Naples Canal

The Naples Canal was a monumental prehistoric construction achievement, a 4,150-foot-long canal that bisected an area between the Gulf of Mexico and Naples Bay. It was dug perhaps as early as A.D. 200 by local American Indian inhabitants of the Ten Thousand Islands or by the neighboring Calusa Indians. Its central section, cut through a sandhill with a relatively deep water table, is the deepest Indian canoe canal ever found in Florida. By digging down to access ground water, its builders showed an understanding of the land and hydrology and created a channel deep enough to penetrate the water table and consistently hold enough water for dugout canoes to traverse it. The canal cut the distance between Gordon’s Pass and Doctor’s Pass by half and provided a more efficient and safer route for canoe paddlers and their possessions than open-water travel. Still clearly visible in the late 1800s, it had been totally destroyed by land development by the 1960s, leaving no trace of this remarkable prehistoric engineering achievement.

Naples, Florida · United States