Things to Do in Miami

Most visitors leave Miami without realising the city sits between two national parks, and the one they think they visited is usually not the one they did.

Everglades National Park protects the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States: a slow sheet of fresh water moving south through sawgrass towards Florida Bay. The closest entrance to the city is Shark Valley on the Tamiami Trail, roughly 45 minutes to an hour west of Brickell, where a 15-mile loop road can be walked, cycled or ridden on a tram, and alligators lie on the verge within a few feet of the path. The main eastern entrance at Ernest F. Coe, near Homestead, opens onto the Anhinga Trail and the long road down to Flamingo on Florida Bay. Entrance is currently around $35 per vehicle for seven days, with an additional fee introduced in 2026 for non-US residents. Confirm the current schedule with the park before you go.

Here is the correction that matters: airboats do not operate inside Everglades National Park. The commercial airboat operators you will be offered on Calle Ocho and at hotel desks run on private land and in the Miccosukee and Big Cypress areas along the Tamiami Trail north of the park boundary. That is not a scam, and several of those rides are genuinely good, but a great many guides and booking sites describe them as national park tours, and they are not. If the national park itself is what you want, that means Shark Valley, Ernest Coe, or a slough slog with a ranger, none of which involve an airboat.

Biscayne National Park, south of the city towards Homestead, is about 95 percent water. It protects the northernmost Florida Keys, a section of the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States, and the mangrove shoreline in between. There is a visitor centre at Convoy Point with a short shoreline walk, and it is pleasant, but it is not the park. The park is offshore: Boca Chita Key with its ornamental lighthouse, the snorkelling sites on the reef, and the wrecks of the Maritime Heritage Trail. Boat trips run from Convoy Point and from Coconut Grove, with a Boca Chita heritage cruise typically in the region of $80 per person. Without a boat you are looking at the edge of it.

Miami's food is not a cuisine, it is a set of diasporas that arrived at different times and never fully merged. Cuban is the oldest and loudest layer: the ventanita, the walk-up window where you order a colada and a pastelito and drink it standing on the pavement, is a genuine daily ritual rather than a tourist activity. Little Havana has the most of them, but so does Hialeah, and so does any strip mall in the west of the county.

Haitian cooking is concentrated in Little Haiti and along the corridors north of it: griot, legim, pikliz, and the sort of small dining room that has been open for thirty years. Colombian, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan food are everywhere, and the arepa and the fritanga are as much Miami staples as the Cuban sandwich. In the south of the county, Homestead and Redland farm stands sell mamey, lychee and Florida avocado in season, and several have been in the same family for generations.

For culture, the map runs roughly like this. Contemporary art is in Wynwood, the Design District and the Rubell and de la Cruz collections. Institutional art is downtown at PAMM on the bay. Cuban-American cultural life is on Calle Ocho and at the Tower Theater. Architecture is split between the Art Deco Historic District in South Beach, which holds roughly 800 preserved buildings from the 1920s to the 1940s and is the largest concentration of that architecture anywhere, and Coral Gables, where a 1920s developer built an entire Mediterranean-revival city and wrote the rules to keep it that way.

The biggest single week in the cultural calendar is Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, which brings the fair to the Miami Beach Convention Center and around twenty satellite fairs, parties and installations to the rest of the city. It also roughly doubles hotel rates and fills restaurants for a fortnight. Plan around it in either direction.

Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic are two different bodies of water with two different uses, and knowing which one you want saves a wasted afternoon.

The bay is shallow, sheltered and warm, and it is where Miami's boat culture lives. Sandbars appear at low tide and fill with rafted-up boats at weekends. Mangrove islands run down the middle. Stiltsville, a small group of houses standing on pilings in the flats off Key Biscayne, is a surviving trace of a 1930s fishing-shack community and is now part of Biscayne National Park. Kayak and paddleboard launches at Oleta River State Park in North Miami, Matheson Hammock, Virginia Key and Crandon all put you into protected water rather than surf.

The ocean is what people picture: the long Atlantic beach from South Pointe north. It has small surf most of the year, clear green water when the wind is right, and a tan-coloured sargassum season in late spring and summer that arrives in mats and is nobody's fault. Lifeguard stands are the visual signature of the beach here, each one different, a public art project that became a symbol of the city.

Two practical notes. First, the beaches on Miami Beach are all public to the high-water mark, including the stretches in front of the hotels, and there are numbered public access points along Collins Avenue. What you pay for is a lounger and an umbrella. Second, Haulover Beach Park, north of Bal Harbour, contains a legal clothing-optional section, which is signposted and operates alongside the conventional family beach in the same park. It is stated here because visitors regularly wander into it by accident.