"Venice of America" is more than a humble-brag on Fort Lauderdale's official city seal--it's an acknowledgement of the 300 miles of inland waterways that run through Greater Fort Lauderdale, with about 165 of those miles in the city of Fort Lauderdale itself. And yes, those are authentic Venetian gondolas gliding along the city's New River, a tidal estuary connected to the Everglades. Professional gondoliers in striped shirts set the ambiance, and each gondola is the picture of elegance from the ferro to the risso.

With more than 13 million overnight visitors each year, Fort Lauderdale's 560 hotels and 36,000 hotel rooms stay pretty busy. Greater Fort Lauderdale also has over 4,000 restaurants, 63 golf courses, 12 shopping malls, 16 museums, 132 nightclubs, 278 parkland campsites, and 100 marinas housing 50,000 resident yachts.

Spring break as we know it began in 1936 when a swimming coach from Colgate University in frigid Upstate New York decided to take his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand-new Olympic-size pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. In recent years, however, the city has discouraged college students from visiting the area by passing strict laws aimed at preventing the mayhem that occurred during the height of Spring Break mania in the 1970s and 1980s.

The disappearance of five Navy torpedo bombers that took off from Fort Lauderdale on December 5, 1945, helped establish the myth of the Bermuda Triangle. All 14 airmen on Flight 19 were lost, as were all 13 crew members of the Martin PBM Mariner flying boat that subsequently launched to search for them.

With more than 100 marinas and 50,000 registered yachts, it's no wonder that Fort Lauderdale is considered the Yachting Capital of the World. There are countless businesses in the city dedicated to yachts and their owners, providing everything from maintenance and remodeling to charter and event services, and the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show is one of the biggest yachting events in the world.

The area in which the city of Fort Lauderdale would later be founded was inhabited for more than two thousand years by the Tequesta Indians. Estimates of the number of Tequesta at the time of initial European contact range from 800 to 10,000, but contact with Spanish explorers in the 16th century proved disastrous for the Tequesta, as the Europeans brought with them diseases, such as smallpox, to which the native populations possessed no resistance.

For decades, a colony of wild African green monkeys has lived in a thick mangrove forest near the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. In fact, monkey sightings are an everyday occurrence at the Park N' Go, an off-airport parking operator located next to the forest, whose Google reviews include scores of photos posted by customers delighted by the green monkeys hanging out nearby. Their ancestors are believed to have escaped from a breeding center that supplied primates for biomedical research in the 1940s.

In 1893, Frank Stranahan arrived on the New River to operate a ferry and a trading post with his wife Ivy. This humble beginning evolved into the New River Settlement, which was later renamed Fort Lauderdale, after a series of forts built by the United States during the Second Seminole War.

Originally constructed of concrete jacks, Osborne Reef was the subject of an ambitious expansion project utilizing old and discarded tires in the 1970s, with the intent of providing habitat for fish, while disposing of trash from the land. The expansion ultimately failed, and the reef has come to be considered an environmental disaster--ultimately doing more harm than good in the coastal Florida waters. Nylon straps used to secure the tires wore out, cables rusted, and tires broke free. In recent years, thousands of tires have washed up on nearby beaches, especially during hurricanes. Local authorities are now working to remove the 700,000 tires, in cooperation with the U.S. Army, Navy, and Coast Guard.

During World War II, Fort Lauderdale became home to a new crop of Spring Break partiers -- wealthy Ivy League students who traditionally partied in the Caribbean, but who had been scared off by rumors of German submarine activity in that area.