Miami, Florida, USA

South Beach is Miami's most iconic neighborhood — a one-square-mile barrier island that packs the world's largest concentration of Art Deco architecture, the Atlantic Ocean, and the nightlife that made Miami internationally famous into a walkable, endlessly stimulating environment. Ocean Drive, the beachfront boulevard lined with pastel-painted hotels from the 1930s and 1940s, is the visual heart of it. The Miami Beach Architectural District — known as the Art Deco Historic District — contains over 800 historic buildings designed between 1923 and 1943, preserved largely intact and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Walking tours offered by the Miami Design Preservation League provide the most rewarding way to understand what you are looking at.

Wynwood is the neighborhood that demonstrated how thoroughly a city can reinvent itself within a decade. What was an industrial warehouse district with little to recommend it has become one of the world's most visited street art destinations, anchored by the Wynwood Walls — an outdoor museum of large-scale murals by internationally recognized artists, established by art collector Tony Goldman in 2009. The surrounding blocks have developed into a dense concentration of galleries, design studios, restaurants, and bars that make it the most creatively concentrated neighborhood in Miami. During Art Basel Miami Beach, held annually in early December, Wynwood becomes one of the most significant art destinations in the world.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) occupies a stunning waterfront building in Museum Park designed by Pritzker Prize winners Herzog & de Meuron, with a collection focused on international art of the 20th and 21st centuries and a cantilevered terrace hanging over Biscayne Bay. Adjacent to it, the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science houses an aquarium, a planetarium, and six floors of science exhibits — one of the finest science museums in the South. Little Havana, centered on Calle Ocho (Southwest 8th Street), offers the most authentic experience of Miami's Cuban-American heritage — cigar rollers at work in open storefronts, cafecito served through walk-up windows, dominoes played in Máximo Gómez Park by men who have been coming here for decades.

The Everglades National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, begins approximately thirty minutes west of downtown Miami. The park covers 1.5 million acres of sawgrass prairies, mangrove forests, and marine estuaries hosting American alligators, American crocodiles, West Indian manatees, Florida panthers, and over 360 bird species. An airboat tour through the sawgrass is the most accessible introduction to the ecosystem for first-time visitors. The Anhinga Trail near the Ernest Coe Visitor Center is a short paved path where wildlife encounters — alligators sunning themselves feet from the path, anhingas drying their wings in tree branches above you — are virtually guaranteed.

Biscayne Bay offers some of the finest water activities in the continental United States. Kayaking through the mangrove tunnels of Biscayne National Park, paddleboarding in the calm waters of the bay, and boat tours past the waterfront mansions of Star Island and Palm Island on the famous Millionaire's Row route are all accessible from Miami Beach or Downtown. The Miami Seaquarium and Monkey Jungle add family-friendly options. And South Beach itself — approximately 10 miles of white Atlantic sand drawing around 10 million visitors to the South Beach strip alone each year — remains exactly what its reputation promises.