Miami

Miami is an American city that speaks Spanish, where Cuban coffee is drunk standing at a window counter and salsa spills out of the shops. In Little Havana the dominoes crack down on café tables and the streets smell of hand-rolled cigars. Sand runs for miles, from the broad beach of Haulover Park to the pines of Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, where the Cape Florida Lighthouse has stood since 1825. Colour is everywhere: pastel facades from the 1930s, walls painted by artists from all over the world at Wynwood Walls, contemporary art facing the bay at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Vizcaya Museum & Gardens adds an Italian palace dropped into the mangroves, with formal gardens and a stone barge moored offshore. An hour west, Everglades National Park opens into sawgrass, alligators and wading birds. Dinner is late, the fish comes straight off the boat, and the night rarely bothers to end.