Miami: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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In 1976 the hotels of South Beach were single-room-occupancy housing for elderly people on pensions, the district was scheduled for demolition, and a developer plan would have levelled twenty blocks. A woman named Barbara Baer Capitman founded the Miami Design Preservation League that year, and in 1979 she got about a square mile of it listed on the National Register — the first twentieth-century district in the United States ever protected. There are roughly eight hundred buildings in it. Walk it early: the light is from the east, the street is empty, and by eleven it is a different place.

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A short history of Miami

The Tequesta people lived on the shores of Biscayne Bay. The city of Miami was incorporated in 1896, after Julia Tuttle, a local landowner, persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his railway to it. In the 1920s it had a property boom, which ended with the hurricane of 1926. After Castro's revolution in 1959 hundreds of thousands of refugees from Cuba arrived, and in 1980 about 125,000 more came in the Mariel boatlift. Neighbouring Miami Beach was for generations a centre for Jewish retirees from the northern United States. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew destroyed large parts of the south of the county.

The ten best sights in Miami

1
Art Deco Welcome Center
About 800 preserved buildings in one square mile; the largest concentration of Art Deco anywhere
2
Colony Hotel
1935, and the blue neon sign is the most photographed object on the street; it was nearly demolished
3
Espanola Way
Built in 1925 as a Mediterranean village; Al Capone ran a gambling operation on the first floor
4
The Bass
A 1930 Deco library turned contemporary art museum; the collection was a couple’s private one
5
Holocaust Memorial, Miami Beach
A 13-metre bronze arm rising from the ground, with figures climbing it; free and always open
6
Jewish Museum of Florida
In two former synagogues; Miami Beach had restrictive covenants barring Jews until the 1940s
7
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
A 1916 winter villa built by about a thousand workers — roughly a tenth of Miami’s population then
8
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Herzog and de Meuron, 2013, on stilts with hanging gardens; built for storm surge from the start
9
Frost Science Museum
A 2017 building with a conical aquarium you look up through from below; next door to the Pérez
10
HistoryMiami
The city’s own museum, and the only place that tells the Tequesta, Seminole and Bahamian story properly

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Eight hundred buildings nobody wanted

The Art Deco Welcome Center · Learn the three things to look for before you start and the whole district opens up: the eyebrows, which are concrete ledges cantilevered over each window to throw shade in a city with no air conditioning; the rule of three, meaning everything comes in threes because the facades were composed symmetrically; and the vertical centre fin, which is purely decorative and exists to make a two-storey building look taller.
The Colony Hotel · From 1935, and the blue neon tube that spells the name is the most photographed object on this street. The neon is not original to the restoration period — most of these hotels lost their signs and the district recreated them from photographs in the 1980s, which is why the colours are so saturated. Capitman and her allies were arrested at one point for standing in front of a demolition machine.
Lummus Park and the beach · This beach is not natural in its present form: the sand was almost entirely gone by the 1970s, eaten by storms and seawalls, and between 1976 and 1981 the Army Corps of Engineers pumped about fourteen million cubic metres of sand onto it from offshore. Every beach you see in Miami Beach is maintained this way and has to be renourished every few years.
Española Way · Built in 1925 as a Mediterranean village of artists’ studios by a developer who wanted a Spanish quarter, and it failed as that almost immediately. Within two years the upper floors were a hotel and the first floor housed a gambling operation in which Al Capone had an interest. It is two blocks long and it is the only piece of the district that is not Deco at all.
The Holocaust Memorial · A thirteen-metre bronze arm rising out of the ground with about a hundred human figures climbing it, finished in 1990. Miami Beach has one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors in the world, and it is worth knowing that until the 1940s much of this island had restrictive covenants in the deeds barring sale to Jews. The survivors who settled here moved into a place that had legally excluded them twenty years earlier.
Lincoln Road · Morris Lapidus — the architect of the Fontainebleau and the inventor of the Miami hotel lobby — was hired in 1960 to close this street to cars and turn it into a pedestrian mall, which made it one of the first in America. He added shade structures, fountains and planting beds, and he said explicitly that the idea was to make people walk slowly. It worked for a decade, then emptied for twenty years, and came back in the nineties.

The city that could not have existed without them

Miami incorporated on the twenty-eighth of July 1896 and Florida law required at least three hundred registered voters for a city to exist. Three hundred and sixty-eight men attended, and one hundred and sixty-two of them were Black, most of them Bahamians who had cleared the land and built the first buildings. Without them there was no quorum and no city. They were then confined by ordinance to a district north-west of the centre called Colored Town, later Overtown, and in the 1960s an interstate highway was driven through the middle of it. This route is that history, and it is a twenty-minute walk from the cruise terminal.

The Miami Circle at Brickell Point · In 1998 a demolition crew clearing a site for flats uncovered a circle of twenty-four holes cut into the limestone bedrock, about eleven metres across. It is a Tequesta structure between fifteen hundred and two thousand years old — the only prehistoric building cut into bedrock found in the eastern United States — and the land was bought by the state after a public fight to stop the towers. It is now a free park and most people walk past it.
Freedom Tower · Built in 1925 as the offices of the Miami News and modelled on the Giralda in Seville. Between 1962 and 1974 the federal government used it as the processing centre for Cuban refugees — about four hundred and fifty thousand people passed through this building and were given identity papers, medical checks and relief here. For a generation of Cuban Miami this is the building where they became legal, and it is now a museum.
HistoryMiami · The one museum that lays out the sequence properly: the Tequesta who were here for two thousand years and were gone by 1800; the Seminole, who were not a single people but a coalition formed partly of escaped enslaved people and who were never defeated; the Bahamian builders; and the three Cuban waves. It also holds the photographs of Overtown before the highway, which are the only record of what was there.
Overtown · In the 1920s this was called the Harlem of the South: forty thousand people, a theatre district, hotels and nightclubs where Black performers who played Miami Beach had to sleep, because the beach hotels would not have them. In the early 1960s Interstate 95 and a highway interchange were routed directly through it. Around ten thousand residents were displaced, the business district was destroyed, and the neighbourhood has never recovered.
Lyric Theater · Built in 1913 by Geder Walker, a Black businessman, and in its time called the most beautiful and costly coloured theatre in the South. Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Sam Cooke all played here — often after performing on Miami Beach and being driven back across the causeway because they could not stay there. It closed in the 1960s, was restored, and reopened in 2014.
Pérez Art Museum · Herzog and de Meuron finished it in 2013 and the design answers one question: what does a museum in Miami look like if you assume the sea is coming. It stands on stilts with the galleries above the projected surge line, the ground floor is deliberately expendable, and the hanging gardens on the canopy are columns of plants that shade the whole building. The collection is weighted toward the Caribbean and Latin America rather than Europe.

Little Havana and the three waves

Cuban Miami arrived in three distinct waves and the difference between them still organises the politics of this city. The first, from 1959 to 1962, was largely professional and middle class and expected to go home within months. The second, the Freedom Flights of 1965 to 1973, brought about three hundred thousand people by scheduled aircraft. The third, the Mariel boatlift of 1980, brought about a hundred and twenty-five thousand in six months, and Castro deliberately included prisoners and psychiatric patients in it, which Miami has never finished arguing about. Walk this in the morning and eat as you go.

Cuban Memorial Boulevard · Four blocks of monuments on a median strip, and the main one is to Brigade 2506 — the exile force of about fourteen hundred men who landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 and were defeated in three days after American air support was withdrawn. Over a hundred were killed and twelve hundred captured; they were ransomed back in late 1962 for fifty-three million dollars in food and medicine. An eternal flame burns here for them.
Domino Park · Officially Máximo Gómez Park, after a Dominican general who fought in the Cuban war of independence. The rule that you must be thirty-five or over to sit and play is a real city ordinance and it is enforced by the players themselves. The games run from nine in the morning and the conversation is almost entirely about Cuba, which these men mostly left more than sixty years ago.
Tower Theater · A 1926 Deco cinema that in the 1960s became the place where newly arrived Cubans learned English and learned America: it showed American films with Spanish subtitles, and later Spanish films with English subtitles for their children. It was the first cinema in Miami to do that systematically. The city owns it now and it still shows films.
The ventanita · The walk-up window is an institution with its own etiquette. A colada is a large coffee poured into a styrofoam cup with a stack of thimble-sized plastic cups beside it, and it is not for one person — you buy it and share it with whoever is standing there. A cortadito is yours alone. The price is usually under two dollars and there is no tipping at a window.
The cigar rollers · Several shops on this street roll by hand in the window, and the tobacco is almost never Cuban — the American embargo has been in force since 1962, so the leaf comes from Nicaragua, Honduras or the Dominican Republic, often grown from Cuban seed by families who left Cuba. A roller does between a hundred and two hundred cigars a day and the job takes years to learn.
Little Haiti · Four kilometres north, and the comparison is the point: Haitians arriving by boat in the same decades as the Mariel Cubans were classified as economic migrants rather than political refugees, held in detention and largely deported, while Cubans were admitted under a 1966 law almost automatically. Two populations fleeing two dictatorships, ninety kilometres apart in the Caribbean, treated under entirely different rules.

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Getting to Miami and getting around

Miami International Airport · Twelve kilometres west; a free automated train links it to the car hire and the Metrorail
Fort Lauderdale Airport · Thirty-four kilometres north; often much cheaper, and the Brightline train connects it to downtown
MiamiCentral · The Brightline terminus; Orlando in three and a half hours and the only fast train in the country
Government Center · Where the Metrorail and the free elevated Metromover meet; the Metromover costs nothing, ever
Brickell · The financial district station, and the one place in Miami where people actually walk to work
Miami Beach Convention Center · The bus hub for the beach; the airport bus and the causeway routes all stop here
Bayside and the port · The busiest cruise port in the world is across the water from here; six ships is a normal day

Cheap eats in Miami

Miami is the American city with the highest share of residents born abroad — well over half the city proper — and the counter food follows exactly. Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Colombian, Venezuelan, Peruvian and Bahamian counters all exist within a few kilometres of each other, almost none are in guidebooks, and the working language of most of them is Spanish. Three to fourteen dollars a thing. Two practical notes: the walk-up window — the ventanita — is where coffee is bought and it is not a café, and the stone crab season runs mid-October to the first of May and outside it the claws are frozen.

The Cuban sandwich · Roast pork, ham, Swiss, pickle and mustard, pressed flat; nine dollars, and no salami in Miami
Cafecito at a ventanita · A dollar fifty; a colada comes in one cup with thimbles beside it and is meant to be shared
Stone crab claws · In season 15 October to 1 May; one claw is taken and the animal is returned to the water alive
Croqueta and pastelito · A ham croquette and a guava pastry, a dollar each; the standard Miami breakfast at a window
Haitian griot · Marinated pork shoulder fried crisp, with pikliz — a vicious cabbage and scotch bonnet pickle
Nicaraguan fritanga · A steam-table counter with grilled meat, plantain and cream; ten dollars for a full plate
Batido · A tropical milkshake — mamey, guanabana or trigo; four dollars and the fruit is not optional
Frita cubana · A thin spiced beef patty under a nest of shoestring potatoes, in a soft roll; six dollars
Key lime pie · Yellow, never green, and never baked with gelatine; the acid sets the custard on its own
Bahamian conch · Conch salad and fritters, from the community that built the first houses in Coconut Grove

Museums in Miami

Miami’s museums are young, because the city is young — it incorporated in 1896 with about three hundred people — and the two interesting consequences are that the collections are weighted toward the Caribbean and Latin America rather than Europe, and that several of the best are private collections opened to the public by the people who assembled them. Two of them are in buildings that answer the sea: one on stilts above the projected surge line, one a villa whose breakwater is a stone barge.

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens · Built 1914–1922 by about a thousand workers when Miami had around ten thousand people
Pérez Art Museum Miami · On stilts, with the galleries above the projected storm surge and a disposable ground floor
Frost Science Museum · A cone-shaped aquarium you look up through from underneath; the Gulf Stream tank is the main one
Rubell Museum · In a former drug-evidence warehouse; the couple who built the collection ran a hotel to pay for it
HistoryMiami · The Tequesta, the Seminole, the Bahamian builders and the three Cuban waves, in order
Institute of Contemporary Art · Free always, and the sculpture garden behind it is free too; it split from another museum in 2014
Jewish Museum of Florida · In two former synagogues; the exhibit on restrictive covenants on this island is the hard part
The Bass · A 1930 Deco library; the collection came from a couple who gave it to the city in 1963
Ancient Spanish Monastery · A 12th-century cloister from Segovia, bought by Hearst in 1925 and reassembled here in 1952

Holy places in Miami

There is almost nothing old in Miami, so the religious buildings here are either imported, invented or very recent — a twelfth-century Spanish cloister brought over in crates, a church whose stones one mason laid by hand without a plumb line, a Haitian cultural centre modelled on a market in Port-au-Prince, and the botánicas on Calle Ocho and in Little Haiti that sell herbs, candles and statues for Santería and Vodou. The last of those is the living religion of a large part of this city and is almost never written about honestly.

Ancient Spanish Monastery · Begun in 1133 near Segovia, dismantled in 1925 and rebuilt here; it is a working parish church
Plymouth Congregational Church · One mason, Felix Rebom, laid every stone of it by hand in 1917 with no plumb line and no helper
Freedom Tower · Modelled on the Giralda in Seville; about 450,000 Cuban refugees were processed inside it
Little Haiti Cultural Center · The building copies the Marché en Fer, the iron market of Port-au-Prince, which burned in 2008
Cuban Memorial Boulevard · A ceiba tree stands at one end and offerings are left at its base; the tree is sacred in Santería
Holocaust Memorial, Miami Beach · Kenneth Treister, 1990; free, open at all hours and the names on the wall are local families’ dead
Cape Florida Lighthouse · 1825; it was attacked in 1836 and the keeper’s assistant was killed, and it stood empty for a decade
Historic Virginia Key Beach · Opened 1945 after a deliberate wade-in; it was the only beach Black residents could legally use

Nature and day trips near Miami

South Florida is the only subtropical ecosystem in the continental United States and it is also the most altered. The Everglades is not a swamp: it is a river about eighty kilometres wide and fifteen centimetres deep, flowing south at roughly eight hundred metres a day, and about half of it has been drained for farmland and housing since 1900. It is the only place on earth where American alligators and American crocodiles both live. Go between December and April — in summer the heat, the water level and the mosquitoes make most of it genuinely unpleasant.

Shark Valley, Everglades · A 24-kilometre paved loop by bike or tram with alligators a metre from the path; sixty-three kilometres west
Biscayne National Park · Ninety-five per cent water, and it protects the northernmost living coral reef in the United States
Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park · Hurricane Andrew destroyed almost every tree in 1992; the whole park was replanted with native species
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden · The most complete collection of palms and cycads in the world; thirty-four hectares and heavily shaded
Matheson Hammock Park · A man-made tidal pool that fills and empties with the bay; shallow, warm and almost waveless
Oleta River State Park · The largest urban park in Florida; mangrove kayak trails and twenty-four kilometres of mountain bike track
Miami Beach Boardwalk and the dunes · The dune ridge beside it was planted deliberately from 1979 as a storm barrier and is now protected
Crandon Park · It was a coconut plantation until 1940 and the old rows of palms are still visible in the park
Deering Estate · A Tequesta burial mound and a fossil pit on the same grounds as a 1922 house; guided access only

Things to do in Miami with kids

The two things that decide a day with children in Miami are shade and water temperature, and both are better than people expect: the sea is between twenty-four and thirty degrees all year, and the sheltered bay beaches at Matheson Hammock and Crandon are shallow and nearly waveless, which matters far more with small children than the famous ocean beaches with their rip currents. The free Metromover downtown is an elevated driverless train that children ride for the ride. Plan around three in the afternoon, when the thunderstorm arrives in summer.

Frost Science Museum · Aquarium, planetarium and a weather gallery in one ticket; book a timed slot in school holidays
Matheson Hammock tidal pool · Waist deep, warm and ringed by sand; the single best spot in Miami with a toddler
Zoo Miami · The only subtropical zoo in the continental United States; go at opening, it is forty hectares
Pinecrest Gardens · Cheap, deeply shaded, with a splash pad and a petting barn; this is where local families go
The free Metromover · A driverless elevated train around downtown; it costs nothing and children treat it as a ride
Shark Valley tram · A two-hour ranger-narrated tram around the loop; easier than cycling it with children in the heat
Crandon Park · Two kilometres of shallow bay-side beach with a carousel and picnic shelters; county park prices
Miami Seaquarium · Open since 1955 and the subject of long-running animal welfare disputes; read about it before deciding

Nightlife in Miami

Miami nightlife is the most expensive in the United States outside New York and the structure is worth understanding before you go out: the big South Beach clubs run on table minimums rather than door prices, which means a table costs hundreds and standing at the bar can be awkward. What the city does better and cheaper is live Latin music — Cuban son, salsa and Colombian bands in Little Havana and Wynwood, with a ten or fifteen dollar cover. Clubs here close at five in the morning in Miami Beach, which is later than almost anywhere else in America.

Ball and Chain, Little Havana · A 1935 bar reopened in 2014; live Cuban son most nights and a cover of about fifteen dollars
Wynwood · Breweries, roof bars and live rooms in the warehouses; the cheapest serious night out in the city
Ocean Drive at night · Table minimums, aggressive touts and a menu you should read before sitting down; walk it, do not eat on it
Lincoln Road and Sunset Harbour · Two blocks west of the crowd; this is where Miami Beach residents actually drink
Mary Brickell Village · The after-work district, on the Metrorail, and the only part of Miami with a walkable bar grid
The New World Center · Gehry, 2011; free concerts are projected onto the outside wall and people sit on the lawn

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Frequently asked questions about Miami

What is there to see in Miami?

The top sights in Miami are Art Deco Welcome Center, Colony Hotel and Espanola Way. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Miami?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Miami without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Miami?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Miami, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Eight hundred buildings nobody wanted.

How do you get to Miami and get around?

The main ways are Miami International Airport, Fort Lauderdale Airport and MiamiCentral. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Miami, and for how much?

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