🇺🇸 United States · The South / Southeast
Miami Beach is one of the most iconic urban beaches in the world: a barrier island facing the city of Miami, linked to the mainland by causeways over Biscayne Bay. It is a byword for golden sand, palm trees, turquoise sea and a glamorous lifestyle that mixes the tropical with the cosmopolitan. Here the famous Art Deco district of South Beach, the luxury hotels of Collins Avenue, the nightlife and a strong Latin imprint you can feel on every corner all live side by side.
The tourist heart is South Beach (SoBe), with its celebrated Ocean Drive lined with pastel Art Deco buildings, its Lummus Park promenade facing the sea and its lively nightlife. But Miami Beach is more than SoBe: it takes in the elegant Lincoln Road district, the historic hotels of Mid-Beach, the quieter neighborhoods to the north and the bohemian North Beach next door. And a step away, across the causeways, is Miami with its museums, its Cuban neighborhood of Little Havana and the modern Wynwood district.
This guide covers the essentials of Miami Beach with a practical eye: where the best beaches are, what to see in the Art Deco district, how to make the most of the nightlife and the food scene, how to move between the island and Miami, and when to go. Whether for sunbathing, partying, touring architecture or enjoying Latin and seafood cooking, Miami Beach is a beach break with the soul of a big city.
What is now Miami Beach was, a little more than a century ago, an islet of mangroves and sand. In the early 20th century, entrepreneurs such as John Collins, Carl Fisher and the Lummus brothers drained and filled in the area and connected it to Miami by a causeway, creating a seaside resort that was incorporated as a city in 1915. In the 1920s to 1940s the celebrated Art Deco district went up, now protected. After a period of decline, South Beach was reborn in the 1980s and 1990s as a mecca of glamour, fashion and nightlife. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'sunshine state': the land with the oldest European roots in the country, with St. Augustine; home of the Timucua, the Seminoles and the Everglades, of the tourism of Miami and Orlando, of Cape Canaveral and of a vibrant Latino culture.
Read the history of Florida →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It is hard to imagine that one of the most glamorous urban beaches on the planet, with its pastel hotels and its fashion shoots, was little more than a century ago a mangrove swamp where almost nobody lived. At the end of the 19th century, what is now Miami Beach was little more than an islet of mangroves and sand facing the fledgling city of Miami, separated from it by Biscayne Bay. The first attempt to make use of the area was agricultural: the horticulturist John Collins, from New Jersey, bought land with the idea of planting coconut palms and avocados. When the farming project failed to prosper, Collins realized that the real potential of the place lay in its beaches.
To connect the island with the mainland, Collins began building a long wooden bridge across the bay. When he ran out of money, an entrepreneur from Indiana, Carl Fisher —who had made a fortune with automobile headlights—, lent him the funds in exchange for land and became the great driving force behind the resort. Fisher dredged the bay, filled in swampy ground with sand from the bottom, planted vegetation and aggressively promoted the place as a tropical paradise. For their part, the Lummus brothers developed the southern area (the future South Beach).
The combined effort of these pioneers turned the mangrove swamp into a seaside city. Miami Beach was officially incorporated as a municipality in 1915. In the 1920s, in the middle of the Florida real estate fever, the city grew at full speed with hotels, mansions and golf courses, until the hurricane of 1926 and the Great Depression that followed halted the boom.
The architectural mark that defines Miami Beach to this day was born out of adversity. After the devastating hurricane of 1926 and during the years of the Depression, the city rebuilt itself and kept growing in an architectural style that was then in fashion: Art Deco, in its tropical, streamlined version known as Streamline Moderne. Between 1930 and 1940, hundreds of small-scale hotels and buildings went up, with curved lines, geometric forms, marine motifs (waves, flamingos, palm trees), ornamental towers and light colors that would later turn pastel.
This ensemble, concentrated above all in South Beach, is today one of the largest groupings of Art Deco architecture in the world. The buildings were modest in size but rich in detail, designed for middle-class tourism arriving to enjoy the sun and sea of Florida. During the Second World War, many of those hotels were used to house and train American troops.
In the following decades, however, Miami Beach went into decline: tourism turned toward other destinations, the Art Deco buildings aged and the South Beach area deteriorated. In the 1970s many of those hotels were in poor condition and there were plans for demolition. Salvation came at the hands of the activist Barbara Baer Capitman, who in 1976 founded the Miami Design Preservation League and fought to protect the heritage. Thanks to that movement, in 1979 the Art Deco district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first 20th-century district to achieve it.
The protection of the Art Deco district was the starting point of a spectacular rebirth. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the pastel hotels of South Beach were restored and repainted in bright colors, and the area became a magnet for fashion, photography, film and nightlife. Runway shows and advertising campaigns chose Ocean Drive as their setting; celebrities, models and designers —among them Gianni Versace, who had his famous mansion on Ocean Drive— made 'SoBe' a byword for international glamour.
The television series 'Miami Vice', in the 1980s, had projected to the world a stylized, colorful image of the city that helped forge its new identity. South Beach became one of the world's epicenters of partying, with nightclubs, fashionable restaurants and a cosmopolitan, open atmosphere, which also made it an emblematic LGBT travel destination.
In parallel, Miami and its metropolitan area were being demographically transformed by the massive arrival of Latin American immigrants, above all Cubans after the 1959 revolution and, later, from all over Latin America. That influence made Spanish an everyday language and gave the region its unmistakable Latin flavor. Today Miami Beach combines that legacy: protected Art Deco architecture, world-famous beaches, glamorous nightlife and a deeply Hispanic culture, all in an island city that in barely a century went from mangrove swamp to global icon.
Over the last two decades, Miami Beach has consolidated its place as one of the most visited tourist destinations in the United States, with millions of visitors a year drawn by its beaches, its nightlife, its design hotels and international events such as Art Basel Miami Beach, the great contemporary art fair that since 2002 has turned the city each December into an epicenter of world art, design and fashion.
At the same time, Miami Beach faces one of the most serious challenges of any coastal city on the planet: sea level rise. Because of its low elevation and its porous limestone ground, the city increasingly suffers the phenomenon of 'sunny day flooding', in which water comes up through the drainage system even without rain, during the highest tides. The city has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in raising streets, installing pumps and reinforcing infrastructure, becoming a case study worldwide in how a first-rank tourist city adapts to climate change.
Despite these challenges, Miami Beach keeps reinventing itself: new developments, careful restorations of the Art Deco heritage and a diversified economy combining tourism, finance and technology (with the arrival of fintech and crypto companies in recent years) keep the city as one of the most recognizable symbols of Florida and of the southern United States.