Pine Island & Matlacha

The Greater Pine Island Community Plan and Matlacha Overlay

Pine Island and the neighboring island village of Matlacha form a unique, laid-back coastal community known for its Old Florida charm, vibrant art galleries, and world-class fishing. No sandy beaches here! Instead, Greater Pine Island is surrounded by mangroves and aquatic preserves known for its seagrass beds and as nurseries for hundreds of species of sea life. Anglers fish the flats or target world-class tarpon just off its shores.

Pine Island lies west of Cape Coral and 30 miles west of Fort Myers. Matlacha sits in the shallow waters of Matlacha Pass directly between the mainland-Cape Coral and Pine Island. The Pine Island Causeway — and the Fishingest Bridge in Lee County connects Cape Coral to Matlacha and Pine Island.

Pine Island is 17 miles long and about 4 miles wide and includes the distinct communities of Bokeelia, Pineland, Pine Island Center and St. James City. Highlights include the Calusa Heritage Trail, the Museum of the Islands, tropical fruit farms and other agriculture. It has about 10,000 year-round residents and another 5-7,000 seasonal residents.

There is only one way on and one way off the island, which was cut off from the mainland in 2022, when Category 5 Hurricane Ian made landfall on nearby Cayo Costa (just offshore of Pine Island). The area sustained major impacts from that hurricane and two others in 2024, but has been striving back since. Today, hurricane evacuation and protecting natural resources and the community’s coastal-rural way of life remain priority issues for its residents.

Demographics

Community	Population	Median Age	Median Household Income
Greater Pine Island	8,769	61.2	$72,176
Matlacha	598	64.7	N/A

Note: Demographic data are based primarily on the latest available U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey estimates. Lee County Community Planning Areas and overlay boundaries do not always correspond with Census geographic boundaries; figures therefore represent the closest appropriate Census geography and should be considered estimates. Small-area estimates may have relatively large margins of error.

What’s Changing

As we were developing this website, Lee County had not provided any detailed, side-by-side, community-by-community comparisons for current Community Plans with each proposed change. So The Lee Communities Coalition used AI to help generate comparisons for each Community Plan and Overlay. These are displayed here with the caveat that we cannot guarantee that AI-generated comparisons are 100% accurate. As we were creating our site, Lee County began posting community comparisons. We are adding links for each as the Lee County reports/comparisons become available. Click here for the county’s Comp Plan page.