A three-day route through Miami, from Calle Ocho to the Everglades

Miami rewards a visitor who plans three days rather than one long weekend, according to a guide published in March 2024 by Richard Luscombe. It runs from the domino tables of Little Havana to the airboat channels of the Everglades, with detours through an arts district built on old warehouses and an estate built on old money.

Little Havana forms the natural starting point. Cuban refugees settled along Calle Ocho after the 1959 revolution, and the neighbourhood still carries their imprint. At Máximo Gómez Park, elderly Cuban exiles gather regularly to play dominoes, a fixture of the street that predates most of the tourism around it.

From warehouses to walls

Wynwood tells a different story. What was once a stretch of industrial warehouses has, in recent years, become one of the city's arts hubs. Wynwood Walls anchors the shift: outdoor murals produced by international artists cover buildings that once held little more than freight.

The contrast with Little Havana is deliberate in the itinerary. One neighbourhood preserves; the other reinvents.

An estate, a garden, a hotel

Vizcaya offers the guide's clearest piece of history. The Mediterranean revival estate was built by James Deering more than a century ago and later acquired by Miami-Dade County, which now maintains it as a public site.

Coral Gables holds two further stops. The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden spans 83 acres of flora and fauna, a scale that sets it apart from smaller city gardens. Nearby, the Biltmore Hotel has operated since it opened in 1926, a landmark that has outlasted several waves of Miami development around it.

South Beach on foot, the wetlands by boat

In South Beach, the Miami Design Preservation League runs architectural walking tours, a way of reading the city's Art Deco district without a car or a guidebook in hand. The pace slows deliberately here; the buildings are the point.

The final leg leaves the coast altogether. Coopertown Airboats runs wildlife tours through the Everglades wetlands, closing the three days on a field with nothing urban left in it.

Taken together, the route reads less like a checklist than a case for Miami's range: a Cuban exile enclave, a converted warehouse district, a century-old estate, a 1926 hotel and a wetland an hour from the beach, all inside one itinerary.