South Beach and Ocean Drive
Pastel art deco fronts facing the Atlantic, with the sand right behind.
Duration
2 hrs – 4 hrs
Best time
Early morning, or after dark
Open
Every day
Entry price
Free
The art deco district of South Beach has around eight hundred buildings from the 1920s to the 1940s, saved from demolition in the 1970s by Barbara Capitman and her Miami Design Preservation League. It is the first twentieth-century district on the American national register.
The pastel colours are not original: the fronts were white or beige, and the pink and turquoise palette was applied in the 1980s by a designer, Leonard Horowitz. Ocean Drive holds the most photographed hotels, and the sand is a hundred metres behind.
Getting there
Bus 120 from downtown Miami, or the South Beach Local service on site. The district is entirely walkable between 5th and 23rd streets.
Rules on site
The Ocean Drive restaurants add an eighteen to twenty per cent service charge automatically and then leave the tip line blank: check before paying twice. Parking is expensive and towing is quick.
Other places in Miami
- Wynwood Walls and its districtA former warehouse district covered in monumental murals.
- Little Havana and Calle OchoCuban coffee at the counter, the domino games of Máximo Gómez Park and the cigar rollers.
- Everglades National ParkA million and a half hectares of wetland, with alligators a boardwalk away.
Key Biscayne and Bill BaggsAn 1825 lighthouse, pines, and a beach with no towers behind it.