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.
The City
of Miami
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...
read
more >>
