Welcome to Baynanza, the massive effort to clean up Miami’s shoreline

Take a stroll through the lush grounds behind the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens and you’ll find yourself at a one-of-a-kind staircase. The steps are made of hardened coral called coquina, and they lead down into the murky depths of a mangrove forest. There are a couple of moorings at the bottom that look like barber poles, where you can imagine Venetian gondolas pulling up.

While the stairs make a sweet backdrop for engagement photos, they’re also a harbinger. David Hardy, the horticulture manager at Vizcaya for a decade now, has watched as the bay waters creep up those stairs inch by inch. More and more every year, the rising waters also carry in plastic bottles, wrappers, netting—the detritus of society that, let’s be honest, doesn’t look great in a selfie.

All that junk will vanish over the span of a day when a few hundred volunteers descend on Vizcaya to fish around 700 pounds of trash from that mangrove swamp. The efforts are part of Baynanza, a county-wide series of events with the goal of cleaning up Biscayne Bay and raising awareness around the constant challenge of preserving our local waterways.

“This is truly critical,” Hardy says of Baynanza. “And the level of enthusiasm of the people who come out, and their concern for the environment—it’s encouraging to see how many people really care.”

Since it began in 1982, more than 100,000 volunteers have shown up for Baynanza’s annual Biscayne Bay Cleanup Day and collected more than 500 tons of trash from its shores. The work continues on Saturday, April 15, and if you haven’t signed up yet, no worries: Baynanza welcomes walk-ups.

This year, organizers have expanded Baynanza’s footprint by adding four inland sites upriver from the bay. They’re among an impressive 31 cleanup locations for 2023, stretching across Miami from Biscayne National Park to Oleta River—including five sites accessible only by boat.

One of the busiest spots for volunteers each year is the stunning swath of land at Morningside Park and the uninhabited Picnic Islands off its shore. Efforts there will be overseen by the Miami Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that works to bring attention to water quality issues.

“Anytime organizations host cleanup events, it’s really just treating the problem,” says Erin Cover, Miami Waterkeeper’s education and outreach manager. “But the real impact is raising the importance of these issues.”

Throughout the year, Miami Waterkeeper conducts water-quality testing in 22 sites across South Florida. Those tests help monitor the overall health of the bay, spotting problems as they develop, like the combination of warm water and an algae bloom that helped contribute to the death of 27,000 fish and wildlife over five days in 2020.

Filed under: Headlines by Wendy Jackson
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