Cape Romano is a cape island and a little secret hideaway destination for boaters on the Gulf Coast south of Ft. Myers, just south of Marco Island and northwest of the Ten Thousand Islands in Collier County, Florida. This place has been well documented in the old maps of Florida by many European explorers yet strangely no one is sure why the place is called Cape Romano. We’ll talk about that in a moment but we have got to tell you first that this place is a dream come true for nature lovers and the seasoned explorer.
Much like the rest of the southern Florida region, Cape Romano boasts of its glorious white sandy shorelines where you can take the finest specimens of seashells that you can bring home with you. If you look above you should see royal terns, ospreys and hawks. Look below and see a variety of fishes that look as if they’re almost begging for you to cast that line.
This is a place that’s quite difficult to reach to since it’s far away from the mainland so the area is pretty much isolated. However, that did not stop a few notable individuals to build structures in this rather quiet side of southwest Florida. There is the famous Dome House which was built around the seventies. The house was a conceptual in design so much so that it was made to look futuristic. The house looked like a cluster of interconnected domes and was, for a time, served as a home for the one who had it built, a now deceased businessman by the name of Bob Lee. Overtime, the house got abandoned and the land where it once stood is now engulfed in water, submerging large sections of this house. Today there are a few small domes and a pavilion that serves as a reminder of this once ambitious design. A few meters away from the dome house was a glass pyramid built by Monte and Judy Innes and has also since been abandoned. There was also a pair of abandoned houses on stilts that stands on top of the water whose construction was attributed to Bob Lee. Today, boaters make trips down the cape so as to catch a glimpse of these once proud structures.
Those structures are now surrounded with mystery given how little we know about them. They even so much as to gain some sort of cult following and people saying they were built not by human hands but extraterrestrials. That sounds like nonsense to us but we’re not the ones to judge. However, it is not only the capes structures that are mysterious but also the name of the place itself. No one really knows why this cape is called Cape Romano, but the Calusa Indians were the ones who first settled in and took to calling it Manataca. Juan Ponce de León briefly stopped at Manataca on his first trip from Puerto Rico to Florida, but the Indians didn’t like him being there and didn’t show him that much of a welcome so he was forced to leave after a bitter fight.
What we do know is that there are two theories as to why the island is called Cape Romano. The more widely held theory is that Cape Romano got its name from the survivors of a Romanian shipwreck that colonized the island in 1834. However, it was only in 1878, after the founding of the famous cheese factory “Romano Cheese Corporation” when we first find any actual mention of “Romano” in the oldest surviving historical documents of the region.
