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In the 1920s and 30s came a lifeline: Prohibition. But you don’t live at the edge of the world without being resourceful. After Flagler’s railroad, a miracle of waterborne engineering on par with the Panama Canal, arrived in 1912, the industry collapsed and the city fell into decline. Salvagers could claim a significant amount of a wreck’s load and so many vessels ran aground on the offshore reef – occasionally with the help of a malfunctioning lighthouse – that it became the richest American city per capita.

The houses, with their double balconies and intricate gingerbread trims, date from Key West’s mid-to-late-19th century golden age, when the salvage industry was king. Outside of New Orleans’ French Quarter this is the finest historic walking district in the USA. Barely five square miles, Key West’s historic old town is laid out on a grid of hundreds of colourful wooden two-storey Victorian frame homes known as ‘conch houses’, standing cheek by jowl on coral-paved lanes shaded by jungle: tangle-root banyan trees, bright-red ginger blooms, pink bleeding hearts.

Key west parrot head license plate frames