Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Cortez, FL

Cortez is an unincorporated fishing village in Manatee County that was settled in the 1880s by fishing families from North Carolina's coast, who first called it Hunter's Point.

The village took the name Cortez in 1895, when the U.S. Post Office arrived, and many of today's residents are descendants of those original North Carolina fishing families.

Cortez is celebrated as one of the last remaining active commercial fishing villages in Florida, with working boats still bringing in mullet, stone crab and grouper.

The A.P. Bell Fish Company, founded in 1923, is still family-run and is one of the largest remaining commercial fisheries on Florida's Gulf Coast.

A devastating hurricane in 1921 destroyed most of Cortez's original 19th-century structures, but the village was rebuilt on the same lots, often with salvaged materials.

The historic core of Cortez is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the last intact examples of Florida's maritime heritage.

Cortez is home to the Florida Maritime Museum, housed in the 1912 Cortez Rural Graded Schoolhouse on nearly four acres of the Cortez Nature Preserve, alongside the 1890 Burton Store and the 1907 Pillsbury Boatshop.

In 1991, local preservationists and the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage bought 100 acres of Sarasota Bay shoreline to create the F.I.S.H. Preserve, protecting the village's waterfront from development.

Cortez old-timers proudly say their village was the only community in the United States that required no federal aid during the Great Depression, subsisting on plentiful fish catches and bartering with local farmers.

Cortez counted 4,241 residents in the 2010 census, and recent Census estimates put the population around 5,200 in roughly 2,500 households — a notably old community, with a median age of about 65 and roughly 87% of homes owner-occupied.