Miami Riverwalk

Start at the mouth. The bay end of the river, near the Hyatt and the James L. Knight Center, gives you the widest view: the river opening into Biscayne Bay, Brickell's towers on the south bank, downtown behind you.

Walk upriver on the north bank. The first stretch is proper riverwalk — railing, paving, seating, the water close enough to hear. You pass under the Brickell Avenue Bridge, worth stopping at for the tall column beside it topped by a bronze group of a Tequesta family, by the sculptor Manuel Carbonell, and for the tiled medallions on the bridge itself.

Continue past the South Miami Avenue Bridge and the Metrorail crossing. Around here the character changes: hotel terraces and restaurant decks give way to working frontage, dry docks, and the first of the small cargo berths.

The breaks. At two or three points the path stops dead at a private parcel and you are routed up to the street, along a block of SW 2nd Street or Flagler, and back down. It is unsignposted and it is annoying. Go with it; the walk resumes.

The practical western limit for a casual walk is around the I-95 overpass. Beyond that the river becomes industrial and the pedestrian provision thins out.

Distance and time: an hour of easy walking each way, more with stops. Do it in the morning or the evening. Downtown Miami at 2pm in July is a furnace.

The Miami River carries more commercial traffic than its width suggests, and knowing what you are seeing changes the walk entirely.

The small freighters are the heart of it. Ships too small for PortMiami's terminals load at berths along the upper river for runs to Haiti, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and the smaller Caribbean ports — mixed cargo, often visibly so: cars strapped on deck, pallets of consumer goods, bicycles. It is one of the busiest shallow-draft cargo rivers in the United States and it has been operating this way for a century.

The boatyards haul, paint and repair everything from work boats to very large private yachts. You will see hulls out of the water yards from the footpath.

The bridges are bascules and they open on demand for vessels — except during weekday rush hours, when federal regulation restricts openings so the city does not seize up. If you are here at the right moment, traffic stops, barriers drop, the road splits and lifts, and a ship slides through the middle of downtown.

The fish and the wildlife. Tarpon roll in the river. Manatees come up it, particularly in cooler months. Bull sharks use it; this is not folklore.

The restaurants along the middle stretch — Cuban, Spanish and seafood, with dock seating — are among the more distinctive places to eat downtown, precisely because the view is of work rather than of a bay.

On the south bank at the river mouth, in a small park at Brickell Point, a circle roughly 38 feet across is cut into the limestone bedrock: a ring of basins and post holes made by the Tequesta, generally dated to around two thousand years ago.

It was found in 1998 during demolition ahead of a tower development. What followed was a genuine public fight — archaeologists, activists and eventually the county buying the parcel outright to stop it being built over. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

Managing expectations matters here. The circle itself is protected beneath a covering of soil and turf for conservation reasons, so what you see is a small waterfront park with interpretive signage rather than an exposed archaeological feature. Some visitors find that anticlimactic. Others find it the most affecting spot downtown, because you are standing on the exact ground where people lived for two millennia before any of the glass behind you existed.

Pair it with the Riverwalk on the north bank and with the Tequesta bronze on the Brickell Avenue Bridge, and the three together make a coherent half hour that most visitors to Miami never get.

The site is free, open to the street, and about five minutes' walk from Brickell City Centre and from the Metromover.