Miami for Adults

If you only get one night out in Miami, spend it on Calle Ocho.

Little Havana has live Cuban music most nights in a handful of venues along and just off SW 8th Street between roughly SW 12th and SW 17th Avenues. What you get is a band, a small floor, an older crowd who can dance properly, and a younger crowd learning. Some venues run a beginner lesson before the band starts, which is the least painful way in. Cover charges are modest by Miami standards, mojitos are cheaper than anywhere on the beach, and the neighbourhood's coffee windows are still open on the way out.

The single best night to be there is the last Friday of the month, when Viernes Culturales closes a stretch of Calle Ocho for a free arts and music festival that has been running for more than two decades. It is a neighbourhood event that welcomes visitors, which is a different thing from an event staged for them.

Elsewhere. Wynwood's bars run DJs and live sets, with the Second Saturday gallery nights turning the whole district into a walkable evening. Little Haiti has Caribbean nights with kompa and rasin at the cultural complex and smaller venues nearby, and it is the most under-visited music scene in the city. Downtown and Brickell carry the larger touring venues and the electronic clubs.

Two calendar dates. Miami Music Week in late March brings Ultra to Bayfront Park and fills the city with electronic events for a week. Art Basel in early December brings a parallel party circuit to the fairs. Both distort prices and hotel availability far beyond the venues themselves.

The most characteristically Miami adult activity is not a club, it is a Saturday on Biscayne Bay.

The bay is shallow, and at low tide a series of sandbars appear where the water is thigh-deep and warm. Boats anchor and raft up, music plays, and the whole thing functions as a floating neighbourhood for an afternoon. You can buy into this at several levels. A shared boat party runs $60 to $150 per person for four to six hours, usually leaving from downtown, Miami Beach or Coconut Grove. A private charter with a captain starts around $400 to $900 for a half day and makes sense at six or more people, with the advantage that you pick the sandbar and the hour.

Read the inclusions carefully. Fuel surcharges, ice, drinks and the captain's gratuity are frequently separate lines on a Miami charter, and a $70 headline regularly resolves nearer $120.

Jet skis are the other water product, typically $90 to $180 per hour with a mandatory fuel or damage waiver on top. They run out of Miami Beach, Key Biscayne and the bay marinas. Two honest warnings: the bay is genuinely busy with traffic, and the operators' damage waivers are worth reading before you sign rather than after.

Quieter water. Mangrove kayaking at Oleta River State Park in North Miami, at Matheson Hammock or on Virginia Key, early in the morning when the water is glass and there is nobody on it, is the opposite end of the same bay. It costs $40 to $80 and it is the version most adults remember.

Fishing. Half-day charters run out of Haulover, Miami Beach and Key Biscayne into water that drops off fast: sailfish, mahi and kingfish are all realistic within a few miles of the beach, which is unusual for a major city.

Miami's adult daytime is better than its reputation and it is mostly art, architecture and food.

The private collections. The Rubell Museum in Allapattah and the de la Cruz Collection are among the most substantial private contemporary collections open to the public in the United States, and they are the reason serious people come to this city for art rather than only during Art Basel week. Check current opening arrangements before planning a day around either.

The institutions. PAMM on the downtown bayfront, around $16 and free on the second Saturday of the month, with a terrace over Biscayne Bay. The Institute of Contemporary Art in the Design District, free, with a sculpture garden. The Bass in Miami Beach. Superblue, an immersive-art venue in Allapattah, for a different kind of afternoon.

Architecture. The Art Deco Historic District in South Beach holds roughly 800 preserved buildings from the 1920s to the 1940s, the largest concentration anywhere, and the Miami Design Preservation League's walking tour is led by the organisation that fought to save them in the 1970s. Coral Gables is the counterweight: an entire Mediterranean-revival city planned in the 1920s and still governed by its original design code.

Food. This is where adult Miami is genuinely world-class and genuinely cheap at the same time. A $4 pastelito and colada standing at a ventanita, Haitian griot in Little Haiti, an Argentine parrilla, a Venezuelan arepa counter in a strip mall, and a Design District tasting menu are all the same city. A food tour of Little Havana or Little Haiti at $70 to $120 is the most efficient way in.

Cigars. Little Havana's cigar shops roll on the premises, and the rollers will talk to you. Buy from the bench rather than the souvenir rack.

Haulover Beach Park, on the barrier island north of Bal Harbour, is a Miami-Dade County park with about a mile and a half of Atlantic beach, and it contains a legal, signposted clothing-optional section. It has operated with county sanction for decades, it is separated from the conventional family beach within the same park, and it is marked at the entrance and along the sand. Lifeguards cover both sections. Photography is not permitted in the clothing-optional area, which is enforced socially and by park staff. Parking is charged per vehicle.

That is the full factual position, stated here because visitors regularly wander into it by accident and equally regularly cannot find a straight answer online.

The rest of the adult beach map. South Beach itself is busy, loud and genuinely fun in the morning before the day-beds fill. Mid-Beach, roughly 24th to 44th Streets, is the same ocean with a fraction of the crowd and a boardwalk behind it. North Beach, around 79th to 87th, has shade and locals. South Pointe Park, at the southern tip, is not a swimming beach but its pier over Government Cut puts you a few hundred feet from passing cruise and container ships, which is a better hour than it sounds.

Two seasonal facts. Sargassum weed arrives on the ocean side in mats between roughly March and August; the bay-side beaches are largely unaffected. And the ocean here is warm enough to swim year round, dropping to the low 70s Fahrenheit in January and February and sitting in the high 80s in August.

One legal note. Alcohol on the sand is prohibited on Miami Beach and enforced, and glass containers are prohibited on beaches across the county.