Landmarks
The buildings, streets, and places where Miami’s history is written into the ground.
Vizcaya
James Deering's 1916 bayfront fantasy — a Mediterranean Revival villa and formal gardens built before Miami was really a city, the region's first great statement of imported European grandeur.
The Biltmore Hotel
George Merrick's 1926 crown jewel — a Schultze and Weaver resort with a tower modeled on Seville's Giralda, the architectural high point of Coral Gables and the 1920s boom.
The Fontainebleau
Morris Lapidus's curving, unapologetic 1954 resort that taught Miami Beach how to be glamorous on purpose.
The Eden Roc
Lapidus's 1956 sequel hotel, built next door to the Fontainebleau by a former partner who wanted to out-glamour the original.
Casa Casuarina (Versace Mansion)
The 1930s Ocean Drive mansion Gianni Versace made his own, where he was murdered in 1997 and which now operates as a hotel.
The Delano
The 1940s Art Deco tower that Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck turned into the white-on-white symbol of the South Beach renaissance.
The Setai
A hushed, Asian-influenced luxury hotel and condo tower that signaled Miami Beach's pivot from party strip to global wealth address.
The Raleigh
A 1940s Art Deco hotel best known for a fleur-de-lis-shaped pool that became one of the most photographed in the world.
The Faena Hotel
An Argentine impresario's gold-mammoth-and-red-velvet hotel that willed an entire Mid-Beach arts district into existence.
Ocean Drive
The neon-lit Art Deco strip whose pastel hotels are the single most recognizable image of South Florida.
Lincoln Road
The pedestrian boulevard Morris Lapidus turned into an open-air shopping promenade, once billed as the Fifth Avenue of the South.
The Bass Museum
A 1930s Art Deco library reborn as Miami Beach's contemporary art museum, a quiet civic counterweight to the strip.
The Wolfsonian–FIU
A collector's obsession turned museum, where design objects from 1850 to 1950 reveal how power and propaganda shape everyday things.
Joe's Stone Crab
A 1913 fish house that is older than the city of Miami Beach itself and still serves the claws that made it famous.
The Forge
A clubby Miami Beach steakhouse and society hangout famous for its baroque rooms, deep wine cellar, and decades of scandal.
The Freedom Tower
A 1925 Mediterranean Revival tower built for a newspaper that became the Ellis Island of the Cuban exile.
The Bacardi Building
A jewel-box modernist tower wrapped in tile and glass, built by a rum dynasty in exile.
The Atlantis Condominium
The Brickell tower with a hole punched through its middle, a palm tree and a hot tub framed in the sky.
One Thousand Museum
A tower laced in a white exoskeleton, the last skyscraper Zaha Hadid designed for this hemisphere.
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
A hovering, plant-draped pavilion on the bay where a developer's name became the price of a museum.
The Frost Science Museum
A planetarium, an aquarium, and a science center stacked on the bay under a benefactor's name.
The Adrienne Arsht Center
Two great halls facing each other across Biscayne Boulevard, the city's bet that it could be a serious culture town.
Kaseya Center
The Heat's bayfront arena, a building that has worn three corporate names and survived a crypto scandal.
Bayside Marketplace
A waterfront mall of souvenir stalls and cover bands, the place cruise passengers see before they see anything else.
Miami Dade College
One of the largest and most diverse colleges in the country, the closest thing Miami has to a common front door.
PortMiami
An island of cruise terminals and cargo cranes that calls itself the Cruise Capital of the World and means it.
Miami International Airport
The busiest pipeline between the United States and Latin America, an airport that doubles as the city's economic heart.
The Lyric Theater
The surviving heart of Little Broadway, where Black Miami made its own glamour under segregation.
The Venetian Pool
A public swimming pool carved out of a coral-rock quarry, dressed up as a Venetian lagoon and somehow still operating a century later.
Coral Castle
A one-man monument of carved coral rock built by a heartbroken Latvian immigrant who never explained how he did it.
The University of Miami
A private research university founded in the middle of a hurricane-battered land bust, now one of the region's largest employers and its most reliable feeder of talent.
Florida International University
A public university that grew from a single building on an abandoned airfield into the largest school in Miami and one of the biggest in the country.
Jackson Memorial Hospital
One of the largest public hospitals in the country, the safety-net anchor where much of Miami is born, treated, and stitched back together.
The Lowe Art Museum
Miami's first art museum, a quiet university gallery with a deep bench in pre-Columbian and ancient art that predates the city's flashier collections by decades.
The Coconut Grove Playhouse
A 1927 theater that hosted the American premiere of Waiting for Godot and then spent decades as a shuttered shell at the center of a restoration fight.
Calle Ocho (SW 8th Street)
The street that became a shorthand for Cuban Miami, where dominoes, cafecito, and exile politics all play out within a few blocks.
Miracle Mile
Coral Gables' four-block retail spine, a mid-century main street so associated with wedding gowns it became a regional bridal destination.
Wynwood Walls
An outdoor museum of giant murals that turned a strip of warehouse walls into the single image people use to mean Wynwood.
Versailles Restaurant
A mirror-lined Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho that doubles as exile Miami's town hall, where politicians come to be seen and breaking news draws a crowd.
loanDepot Park
A retractable-roof ballpark dropped onto the footprint of the demolished Orange Bowl, trading one piece of Miami sports history for another.
Hard Rock Stadium
The Dolphins' suburban stadium that reinvented itself as a global events venue, hosting Formula 1, the Super Bowl, and World Cup soccer.
Aventura Mall
One of the largest and most productive shopping malls in the United States, and the de facto town square of a city built around it.
Bal Harbour Shops
An open-air luxury court that turned a small barrier-island village into one of the most lucrative blocks of retail real estate in America.
Biscayne Bay Yacht Club
Founded in 1887 by Coconut Grove pioneer Ralph Munroe, it is generally cited as the oldest sailing club in Florida.
Brickell City Centre
A 2016 mixed-use megaproject that stacked a mall, offices, and condo towers into a single block and signaled Brickell's arrival as a true downtown.
Brickell Key
A man-made island of condo towers floating off Brickell at the mouth of the Miami River, gated and self-contained.
Coral Gables City Hall
A 1928 Mediterranean Revival landmark with a sweeping semicircular colonnade, the civic emblem of George Merrick's planned city.
Dinner Key
A Coconut Grove waterfront that went from Pan Am seaplane base to the home of Miami City Hall.
Fairchild Tropical Garden
A major tropical botanic garden near Coral Gables, named for the plant explorer who helped reshape what grows in America.
Flagler Street
Downtown Miami's original commercial spine, now a dense Latin American retail and wholesale corridor.
Grove at Grand Bay
Bjarke Ingels's pair of twisting residential towers that gave Coconut Grove a piece of global starchitecture.
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
The Design District's free contemporary-art museum, born of a board split and given a permanent home in 2017.
Margulies Collection
Martin Margulies's warehouse of large-scale contemporary art in Wynwood, run with proceeds going to a homeless shelter.
Mary Brickell Village
A retail-and-dining complex in the heart of Brickell, named for the pioneer landowner who helped found the district.
Plymouth Congregational Church
A 1917 coral-rock church in Coconut Grove, hand-built in a style that looks lifted from a Spanish mission.
Rubell Museum
The Rubell family's deep contemporary-art collection, relocated to a sprawling Allapattah complex in 2019.
The Barnacle
Ralph Munroe's 1891 home, the oldest house in Miami-Dade still standing on its original site, now a state historic park.
The Kampong
David Fairchild's Coconut Grove estate and botanic garden, the homegrown counterpart to the public garden that bears his name.
Wynwood Brewing Company
Wynwood's pioneering craft brewery, an early sign that the mural district was turning into a place people would linger.