The capital of Latin America's cultural and financial diaspora in the US — where Cuban and Colombian and Brazilian communities built a bilingual city, Art Deco South Beach is the largest preserved Art Deco district in the world, and the Wynwood Walls turned a warehouse district into a destination
Miami (470,000; metro 6.2 million) is the northernmost capital of Latin America in everything but name — more than 70% of residents speak Spanish at home, and the city functions as the financial, media, and cultural hub for Latin American businesses, art, and music in the United States. South Beach (Miami Beach) is the cultural postcard: Ocean Drive, a mile of 1930s Art Deco pastel hotels facing the Atlantic, is the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world and the backdrop for everything from Miami Vice (1984) to Scarface (1983). The Wynwood district, transformed from a war…
The Miami area (Biscayne Bay) was inhabited by the Tequesta people for at least 2,000 years before European contact; the earliest Spanish colonial reference to the site appears in 1566. The modern city was incorporated in 1896 with 300 residents, its development driven by Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway and the availability of cheap real estate during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. The Cuban Revolution (1959) and subsequent waves of Cuban exiles transformed Miami into a bilingual city by the 1970s — the creation of Little Havana (Calle Ocho) and the establishment of Cuban-Amer…