The Everglades
A one-of-a-kind freshwater wetland. The slow river that holds half the state alive.
Why We Built This
A love letter to Florida.
Toro Wildlands began as one Floridian's love letter to this place — and grew into an invitation.
My name is David Antonio Guillen Sosa. I am first-generation American, raised in South Florida, and I have loved this state for as long as I can remember.
I went to Flamingo Elementary. I remember the owls in the dark, before the school bell. I remember walking home and hearing them again. I remember birds everywhere — wading in roadside ditches, drifting overhead at dusk, perched on fence posts as if they belonged there, because they did. There was farmland near the school then, open land with wildlife in it, and Florida felt vast and alive even inside the suburbs.
The land has changed. Open fields became neighborhoods, and Florida keeps making room for everyone who finds their way here. What I carry are the smaller things — the owls before dawn, the sawgrass at dusk, the birds at the schoolyard fence, the wildness that has always made this place feel like nowhere else on earth.
Toro Wildlands exists so that ache becomes something useful.
We can grow without forgetting
what made this place beautiful.
That's the whole idea. Not a campaign. Not a complaint. A promise — kept by enough of us, often enough, that the children of Florida's future generations still know the sound of owls before dawn, still see wading birds on the way to school, still feel the marsh alive around them.
— David Antonio Guillen Sosa
Native.