Far and away the most exciting city
in Florida, MIAMI is a stunning and often intoxicatingly
beautiful place. Awash with sunlight-intensified natural
colors, there are moments - when the neon-flashed South
Beach skyline glows in the warm night and the palm trees
sway in the breeze - when a better-looking city is hard
to imagine. Even so, people, not climate or landscape,
are what make Miami unique. Half of the two million
population is Hispanic, the vast majority Cubans. Spanish
is the predominant language almost everywhere - in many
places it's the only language you'll hear, and you'll
be expected to speak at least a few words - and news
from Havana, Caracas or Managua frequently gets more
attention than the latest word from Washington, DC.
Just
a century ago Miami was a swampy outpost of mosquito-tormented
settlers. The arrival of the railroad in 1896 gave the
city its first fixed land-link with the rest of the
continent, and cleared the way for the Twenties property
boom. In the Fifties, Miami Beach became a celebrity-filled
resort area, just as thousands of Cubans fleeing the
regime of Fidel Castro began arriving in mainland Miami.
The Sixties and Seventies brought decline, and Miami's
reputation in the Eighties as the vice capital of the
USA was at least partly deserved. As the cop show Miami
Vice so glamorously underlined, drug smuggling was endemic;
as well, in 1980 the city had the highest murder rate
in America. Since then, though, much has changed for
two very different reasons. First, the gentrification
of South Beach helped make tourism the lifeblood of
the local economy again in the early Nineties. Second,
the city's determined wooing of Latin America brought
rapid investment, both domestic and international: many
US corporations run their South American operations
from Miami and certain neighborhoods, such as Key Biscayne,
are now home to thriving communities of expat Peruvians,
Colombians and Venezuelans.
Many
of Miami's districts are officially cities in their
own right, and each has a background and character very
much its own. Most people head straight to Miami Beach
, specifically the South Beach strip, where many of
the city's famed Art Deco buildings have been restored
to their former stunning splendor, all pastels, neon
and wavy lines. Though touted as the chic gathering
place for the city's fashionable faces, it's not as
exclusive as you might expect, especially on weekend
afternoons when families and out-of-towners join the
washboard stomachs and bulging pecs. Make time, too,
for Key Biscayne , a smart, secluded island community
with some beautiful beaches, five miles off the mainland
but easily reached by a causeway.
On
the mainland, downtown has a few good museums but little
else of interest to visitors. Little Havana , to the
west, is the best spot to head for a Cuban lunch, while
immediately south the spacious boulevards of Coral Gables
are as impressive now as they were in the 1920s, when
the district set new standards in town planning. Independently
minded but equally wealthy Coconut Grove is also worth
a look, thanks to its walkable center and a couple of
Miami's most popular attractions.
