🌴 Miami

What Makes It Worth It

🏛 South Beach Art Deco District

Miami is the northernmost city of Latin America in all but geography — a metropolis where over 70% of residents speak Spanish as a first language, where the cultural reference points are Havana, Bogotá, and São Paulo as much as New York or Washington, and where the combination of subtropical heat, turquoise water, and Latin American creative energy has produced an aesthetic entirely its own. The city has reinvented itself multiple times since Henry Flagler's railroad reached the mangrove coast in 1896, and the current version — a global finance and arts hub with one of the strongest real estate markets in North America — represents its most cosmopolitan iteration.

South Beach occupies a barrier island across Biscayne Bay from downtown, its Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue preserving the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world — over 800 buildings designed between 1923 and 1943 in pastel colours with porthole windows, racing stripes, and bas-relief nautical decorations. The district was in serious decay by the 1970s and was essentially saved by the Miami Design Preservation League and the subsequent recognition of its architectural significance. Today the same buildings host restaurants and nightclubs at street level and hotels on the floors above, functioning simultaneously as a living museum and a functioning resort neighbourhood. The beach itself — 10 miles of white sand maintained by constant replenishment — draws international visitors year-round.

Wynwood, a former garment district warehouse neighbourhood 10 minutes north of downtown, has become one of the most significant street art destinations in the world following the establishment of the Wynwood Walls by Tony Goldman in 2009. The original twelve buildings commissioned from international street artists including Shepard Fairey, Futura, and Os Gemeos have expanded into an entire neighbourhood of outdoor murals, with new walls added annually during Art Basel Miami Beach in December. Art Basel itself — the American edition of the Swiss art fair — has transformed Miami into a genuine global art market centre for one week each December, drawing galleries, collectors, and artists from 60 countries and generating over $500 million in sales.

The Florida Keys begin 60 kilometres south of Miami at the tip of the Florida peninsula — a 190-kilometre chain of limestone islands connected by the Overseas Highway and its 42 bridges to Key West at the end. The coral reef running along the Atlantic side of the Keys is the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States and offers snorkelling and diving of extraordinary quality. The Everglades, entering from the western edge of Miami-Dade County, is the largest subtropical wilderness in North America — a shallow river of grass 160 kilometres wide and only 15 centimetres deep, navigable by airboat through sawgrass prairies and cypress swamps inhabited by alligators, manatees, and over 360 bird species.

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