Little Islandia, fare thee well.

A half century after becoming Miami-Dade County’s 27th city, part of an ambitious but failed plan to connect Key Biscayne to Key Largo through a series of bridges, the village that once touted a population of 18 — but today houses only five — is close to once more becoming part of unincorporated Dade.

All that remains is a public hearing in February — an airing not likely to attract much attention because the people who live on two of the village’s 33 islands don’t particularly care whether the town has meetings, a manager or an annual budget. One is a Biscayne National Park ranger, another does maintenance work for the park service. There’s a caretaker, and a boat captain and his wife. As for the daily mechanics of municipal business, well, it’s been decades since any of that took place.

“It never really operated like a city,” said County Commissioner Dennis Moss, whose South Miami-Dade district extends eight miles over Biscayne Bay’s rippling waters to the islands of Islandia. “It never filed papers with the state like a normal city, and the only way to get there is by boat.”

Or maybe a hang glider — perhaps the only thing the creators of the county’s easternmost municipality didn’t think of as visions of wealthy tourists filled their minds.

Originally a haven for shipwreck survivors, and fished by the Tequesta Indians, a group of Bahamians made their way to the center of Islandia on Elliott Key by the mid 1800s. Farming was their goal, the island’s base of coral rock their downfall.

Still, by the early 1900s, Islandia had its own school district and more than 100 residents. Those numbers dwindled as people dealt with the hardships of no electricity, little or no farming, and a long run over choppy waters to reach mainland stores. Then, around Christmas 1960, 13 of the island’s 18 registered voters decided they wanted a city of their own, and a municipality was born. The 33 northernmost, mostly barren islands of the Florida Keys, all within 4,000 acres of Biscayne National Park, became Islandia.

The plan: Build a causeway across the bay and fill the main island of Elliott Key with luxury hotels and golf links, oceanfront homes, even a six-lane roadway running down its center strip. Locals and developers pictured tourists drinking out of tall glasses with little umbrellas, kids building sand castles on the beach, wives dragging stuffed bags home from high-end retailers.

Of course, none of that happened.

First came a desperate grassroots effort to save the island from development. Yet even as the fishermen and gardeners and elected state leaders who so loved Elliott Key were gathering steam toward including it in the national park system, locals like Islandia Mayor Luther Brooks fought them tooth and nail.

Early in 1968, Brooks and members of his small council got ahold of a large bulldozer and began clearing a 125-foot-wide swath down the center of the 7-mile-long key. The goal: to build a six-lane Elliott Key Boulevard as the centerpiece of town. It was never built, saving the island from the T-shirt shops and strip malls that today consume so much of nearby Key Largo.

“This was long before Earth Day, and before environmental consciousness was widespread,” Biscayne National Park spokesman Gary Bremen said on the key last week, as he scooped up a spongy piece of coral he said had drifted in from the Bahamas.