🇺🇸 United States · East Coast
Miami is sunshine turned into a city. Here, at the southern tip of Florida, the subtropical climate, the palm trees, the pale sandy beaches and the turquoise water of the Atlantic create an atmosphere of endless summer that has made it one of the great pleasure destinations in the United States. But Miami is far more than beach: it is the art deco glamour of South Beach with its pastel buildings along Ocean Drive, the Latin energy you feel on every corner, the art of the Wynwood murals and a nightlife that is the stuff of legend. It is a city to enjoy with all five senses.
And it is, above all, the most Latin city in the United States. Walking down Calle Ocho in Little Havana, listening to salsa, smelling Cuban coffee and speaking Spanish everywhere makes Miami feel like a bridge between the north and the south of the continent. The enormous Cuban community, together with those from so many other Latin American countries, gave it a unique bicultural identity: here American skyscrapers and luxury live alongside the flavor, the music and the warmth of Latin America. For the Spanish-speaking traveler it is an especially comfortable and endearing destination.
This guide covers the essentials of Miami with a practical and warm eye: which beaches to choose, how to enjoy the art deco of South Beach, where to experience Cuban life in Little Havana, which neighborhoods to visit, how to get around a city built for the car, and how to escape to the Everglades or the Keys. Miami is a byword for sun, partying, shopping and Latin flavor, and with a little planning it delivers an unforgettable holiday.
Before the Europeans, the area was inhabited by the Tequesta, an Indigenous people who lived at the mouth of the Miami River. The name 'Miami' in fact comes from an Indigenous word linked to Lake Okeechobee and the river. Spain claimed Florida from the 16th century, and the region passed through Spanish and British hands before joining the United States in 1821. But Miami as a city is surprisingly young: through the 19th century it was barely a handful of settlements in a region of swamps and mangroves. Its birth is largely due to a woman, Julia Tuttle, a businesswoman who persuaded railroad magnate Henry Flagler to extend his line down here; in 1896, with the arrival of the train, the city of Miami was officially founded (Tuttle is remembered as the 'mother of Miami'). The first decades of the 20th century brought the Florida land boom, and the art deco district of Miami Beach and planned cities such as Coral Gables were built. But the great transformation came after the Cuban Revolution of 1959: hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles settled in Miami, followed by immigrants from all over Latin America, turning it into the 'capital of the Americas' and a bilingual, multicultural metropolis. 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.
Long before the skyscrapers and the fashionable beaches existed, the mouth of the Miami River was inhabited by the Tequesta, an Indigenous people who lived for centuries in southeastern Florida. The Tequesta were hunters, fishers and gatherers who made the most of the enormous richness of Biscayne Bay, the mangroves and the wetlands: they fished, gathered shellfish and hunted in a land of water and sun. They left traces of their presence, such as the so-called Miami Circle, an enigmatic circle of holes carved into the limestone beside the river, discovered in the middle of downtown in the late 20th century.
The name 'Miami' has Indigenous roots. Most sources link it to a word from the region's Indigenous peoples (related to Lake Okeechobee and the river that flowed from it) usually associated with the idea of 'big water' or 'fresh water'. That name, tied to water, proved prophetic for a city that would be born surrounded by bays, rivers, wetlands and ocean.
Contact with Europeans, from the 16th century onwards, was devastating for the Tequesta, as it was for so many peoples of the Americas: disease, conflict and displacement reduced them drastically, until they had practically disappeared as an organized people by the 18th century. Their legacy survives above all in the name of the city and in the archaeological remains that from time to time emerge from beneath the modern metropolis.
Florida was Spanish territory for centuries. After the arrival of Juan Ponce de León in the early 16th century (who gave it the name 'La Florida', either for Pascua Florida — Easter — or for the vegetation), the Spanish Crown claimed the peninsula, although the southeast — the region of the future Miami — largely remained outside effective colonization, dominated by its swamps, mangroves and the presence of Indigenous peoples. Spain founded St. Augustine, in the northeast, in 1565, considered the oldest European-founded city in the United States, but the far south remained almost empty of Europeans.
Florida changed hands several times. It passed briefly under British control (1763-1783), returned to Spain and finally, in 1821, was ceded to the young United States. In 1845, Florida became a state of the Union. Through the 19th century, the southeast remained a remote and almost wild region, and also the setting for the long and harsh wars against the Seminoles, a people formed in good part by Indigenous people and African Americans who held out in the Everglades.
By the end of the 19th century, the area of present-day Miami was barely a handful of scattered settlements beside the river and the bay, home to a few pioneers, in the middle of lush and untamed nature. Nothing suggested that this swampy, isolated corner would become, within a few decades, one of the country's great metropolises. For that to happen it took the railroad and the vision of a few determined people.
The story of how Miami was born has a protagonist unusual for the time: a businesswoman. Julia Tuttle, a widow from Cleveland who had moved to the area and owned large tracts of land beside the Miami River, was convinced of the enormous potential of that sunny land. Her great obsession was to get the railroad to reach it, because without a train there was no way to develop the region. For years she tried to persuade the magnate Henry Flagler, owner of the Florida East Coast Railway, who was extending his tracks southward, to carry the line as far as Miami.
The legend — very widely told, though some historians qualify it — says the opportunity came with a catastrophic freeze: in the winter of 1894-1895, a cold snap devastated the citrus crops of northern and central Florida, but the Miami area, further south and sheltered, came through unharmed. Tuttle is said to have sent Flagler orange blossoms (or green branches) to show him that the cold did not reach that far. Convinced, Flagler finally extended the railroad to Miami, arriving in 1896.
With the arrival of the train, the city of Miami was officially founded that same year, 1896, with barely a few hundred inhabitants. Julia Tuttle, who had donated land for the railroad and for the new city, went down in history as the 'Mother of Miami', the only woman recognized as the founder of a major American city. Flagler, for his part, built hotels and drove development. Almost out of nothing, the city destined for extraordinary growth had been born.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Miami grew at an astonishing rate, driven by its climate, its beaches and the speculative fever known as the 'Florida land boom' of the 1920s. Thousands of people from the north of the country, drawn by the promise of endless sun and easy real estate fortunes, poured into Florida. Beaches were developed, wetlands drained, and entire neighborhoods and cities sprang up almost overnight.
Some of the area's most characteristic features were born in that era. Miami Beach, on the barrier island facing the city, was developed as a resort thanks to entrepreneurs such as Carl Fisher, who turned mangroves into an elegant beach city. Coral Gables was conceived by George Merrick as a 'beautiful city' planned down to the last detail, in a strict Mediterranean-Spanish style. The boom stopped abruptly around 1926, through a combination of speculative saturation and, above all, a devastating hurricane that struck Miami that year, followed by the Great Depression.
It was precisely during the 1930s, in the middle of the recovery, that South Beach filled with the buildings that make it world famous today: art deco. Hotels, apartment buildings and shops were built with the elegant lines, pastel colors, geometric and nautical details and neon signs of that modern, optimistic style. That unrepeatable concentration of art deco architecture, saved from demolition decades later by the campaigning of preservation activists, is one of Miami's great treasures.
The event that transformed Miami forever, and that explains its identity today, was the Cuban Revolution of 1959. After Fidel Castro came to power and a communist regime was installed on the island, hundreds of thousands of Cubans — at first mainly from the middle and upper classes, and later from every walk of life — fled into exile, and Miami, the closest big American city to Cuba, became their main destination. That first great wave was reinforced by successive waves of migration over the decades, such as the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
The Cuban community put down deep roots, especially in the neighborhood that came to be called Little Havana, and transformed the economy, politics, language and culture of the city. Miami became bilingual, with Spanish as present as English, and Cuban Americans came to carry enormous economic and political weight. After the Cubans came immigrants from across Latin America — Nicaraguans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Argentines, Haitians, Dominicans and many more — and from the Caribbean, adding layers to an ever more diverse society.
Thanks to that population and its geographic position, Miami established itself as the great gateway between the United States and Latin America: a financial, commercial, media (home to major Spanish-language networks) and communications hub for the whole hemisphere, which many call 'the capital of the Americas'. Today it is a global, multicultural metropolis in full ferment, where the luxury of the beaches and the skyscrapers lives alongside Latin American flavor, music and warmth, and where sun, art, partying and Spanish define an identity unlike any other in the country.