Mounds, Canals, and History: Ortona Indian Mounds Park

Easy to miss but definitely worth a visit, and a little sad.

I went to Ortona Indian Mounds Park last Saturday, a site I’ve been planning to visit for a long time. Located east of Lake Okeechobee near LaBelle Florida, this little-known spot might be my favorite of all the places I’ve seen since I started researching for Calusa Gold, my upcoming historical fiction novel. It is also kind of sad.

This is a view of the closed, broken boardwalk leading to the top of Mound A.

I say Ortona Indian Mounds Park is a bit sad because of its condition. If not for the signs and broken-down boardwalk, one could walk through the area and never have any idea it was significant Calusa and Belle Glade Indian site for many years. My next picture shows the back side of the same mound:

You can see the remnants of the boardwalk in the center of the photo.

These pictures show both sides of the park. It really is a nice place to visit. On Saturday I only saw two other people, and it was cool in the shade. It is a pretty place. On the other hand, there just isn’t much left of what was a major settlement.

The Park is a few miles north of the Caloosahatchee River, which the Calusas used to travel from Florida’s west coast and Estero Bay to Lake Okeechobee and farther east across the state. They built two canals, the eastern, about two miles long, and western, about 2.3 miles long, which led from the river north to the Ortona Mounds site where they met.