Miami
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Greater Miami’s multifaceted appeal means fun-in-the-sun partying takes place alongside sophisticated cultural happenings in a city that never sleeps. In Miami you will find great weather, first-rate attractions, super shopping, gourmet dining, a cutting-edge art scene, non-stop nightlife and on the water activities that are second to none.
Even so, it's the people, not the climate, the landscape, or the cash, that makes Miami so noteworthy. Half of the two-million-strong population is Hispanic, the vast majority of which are Cuban. Spanish is the predominant language almost everywhere - in many places its the only language you'll hear - and news from Havana, Caracas, or Managua frequently gets more attention than the latest word from Washington.
Just a hundred years ago Miami was a swampy outpost of mosquito-tormented settlers. The arrival of the railroad in 1896 gave the city its first fixed land-link with the rest of the continent, and cleared the way for the Twenties property boom. In the Fifties, Miami Beach became a celebrity-filled resort area, just as thousands of Cubans fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro began arriving here as well. The Sixties and Seventies brought decline, and Miami's dangarous reputation in the Eighties was at least partly deserved. In 1980 the city had the highest murder rate in America.
Since then, much has changed, for two very different reasons. First, the gentrification of South Beach helped make tourism the lifeblood of the local economy again in the Nineties. Second, the city's determined wooing of Latin America brought rapid investment, both domestic and international: many US corporations run their South American operations from Miami, and certain neighbourhoods, such as Key Biscayne, are now home to thriving communities of expat Peruvians, Colombians, and Venezuelans.
