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Few American cities announce themselves as forcefully as Miami does. The skyline rises from Biscayne Bay in a wall of glass and steel, the Atlantic stretches east beyond the barrier islands, and the air carries a particular mixture of salt, humidity, and something harder to name: the cumulative energy of a city that has been reinventing itself for well over a century. Miami sits at a genuine crossroads, geographically and culturally, shaped by waves of Cuban, Haitian, Colombian, and Caribbean migration that have made it one of the most genuinely bilingual major cities in the United States.

The geography does a lot of the work here. Miami proper occupies the mainland, with Brickell and Downtown forming the financial and cultural core, while across the causeways lie Miami Beach and its famous neighbourhoods: South Beach with its Art Deco Historic District, a grid of pastel-coloured buildings along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue that was painstakingly restored from the 1970s onwards and now constitutes one of the largest collections of Art Deco architecture in the world. Wynwood, a former warehouse district north of Downtown, transformed over the past two decades into an open-air gallery, its walls covered in large-scale murals that have made it a reference point for street art internationally. Little Havana, running along Calle Ocho, operates on its own rhythms entirely, with domino parks, cigar shops, and the kind of cafeterias where a cortadito costs very little and the conversation never stops.