What to do in Miami
- Marvel at the Art Deco
The pastel-shaded Art Deco architecture of South Beach provides a gorgeous setting for Miami's most glamorous hotels and bars. For a fun way to take it all in, book onto a Segway Tour.
- Glide along in the Everglades
Florida has numerous creeks and swamps to exploring by boat. The most beautiful of these are in the Everglades.
- Have your adrenaline pumped in Biscayne Bay
Go sailing around the celebrity mansions of Biscayne Bay, or soak up the stellar views from a kayak. Better still, get your heart pumping with a parasailing or flyboarding adventure.
- Go on an Art Walk
Miami is one of the most dynamic art centres in the world, best experienced on a walking tour through the graffiti-wrapped galleries of Wynwood.
- Eat your way through Little Havana
A true slice of Latin America, this lively neighbourhood is the place to come for gut-busting Cuban far and heady café con leche. To really immerse yourself in the area's culinary delights, book onto a walking and food tour.
- Take the kids to Jungle Island
A wildlife park that features a flamingo lake, serpentarium, parrot area and even a tiger compound, all hidden within a lushly landscaped jungle habitat.
- Visit the Pérez Art Museum
Spectacularly sited, this world-class art museum is the jewel in downtown's crown and a symbol of the city's resurgence.
- Sip afternoon tea at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables
As Coral Gables' premier attraction, this hotel is both grand and intimate – sit for an afternoon tea, play a round of golf or just take in the atmosphere.
Accommodation in Miami
Accommodation is rarely a problem in miami – though you should expect rates to go up on weekends, holidays, festival weeks and in the main winter tourist season (Dec–April). Though it can be great fun to stay in one of the numerous art deco south Beach hotels, note that they were built in a different era, and, as such, rooms can be tiny.
Coral Gables
All of Miami’s constituent neighbourhoods are fast to assert their individuality, though none does it more definitively than CORAL GABLES, southwest of Little Havana. Twelve square miles of broad boulevards, leafy side streets and Spanish and Italian architecture form a cultured setting for a cultured community.
Coral Gables’s creator was a northern transplant born in Pennsylvania, George Merrick, who raided street names from a Spanish dictionary to plan the plazas, fountains and carefully aged stucco-fronted buildings here. Unfortunately, Coral Gables was taking shape just as the Florida property boom ended. Merrick was wiped out, and died in 1942 as Miami’s postmaster. But Coral Gables never lost its good looks, and it remains an impressive place to explore. Merrick wanted people to know they’d arrived somewhere special, and as such, eight grand entrances were planned on the main approach roads (though only four were completed). Three of these stand along the western end of Calle Ocho as you arrive from Little Havana.
The best way into Coral Gables is along SW 22nd Street, known as the Miracle Mile. Note the arcades and balconies here, and the spirals and peaks of the Omni Colonnade Hotel, at 180 Aragon Ave one block north, which were completed in 1926 to accommodate George Merrick’s office.
Cubans in Miami
During the mid-1950s, when opposition to Cuba’s Batista dictatorship began to assert itself, a trickle of Cubans started arriving in a predominantly Jewish section of Miami then called Riverside. The trickle became a flood when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and the area became Little Havana, populated by the affluent Cuban middle classes who had the most to lose under communism.
These original immigrants were joined by a second influx in May 1980, when the Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 islanders from the port of Mariel to Miami in just a few days. These new arrivals were poor and uneducated, and a fifth of them were fresh from Cuban jails – incarcerated for criminal rather than political crimes. Bluntly, Castro had dumped his misfits on Miami. The city reeled, and then recovered from this mass arrival, but it left Miami’s Cuban community utterly divided. Even today, older Cuban-Americans claim that they can pick out a Marielito from the way he or she walks.
That said, local division gives way to fervent agreement when it comes to Castro: he’s universally detested. Despite failing to depose the dictator, Cuban-Americans have been far more successful at influencing the US government. Since the 1980s, Cubans have been vociferous supporters of the Republican Party, and therefore one of the main reasons that the US embargo of Cuba (imposed in 1962) remains in place, for now at least.