Miami started as a small trading outpost on the Miami River in the 1890s. Julia Tuttle, a citrus grower from Cleveland, convinced the railroad magnate Henry Flagler to extend his East Coast Railway south after a brutal Florida freeze had left her groves untouched — allegedly by mailing him a fresh orange blossom. The city was officially incorporated in 1896 with just over three hundred residents.
The Roaring Twenties brought a real-estate boom and the pastel-coloured Art Deco district that South Beach is still famous for today. After a 1926 hurricane and the Great Depression cooled the speculation, Miami reinvented itself again — first as a wartime training base, then as a postwar resort town, and from the 1960s onward as the cultural crossroads of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Today the metro area is home to nearly six million people and roughly seventy languages. You can hear them all on a single afternoon walk from Little Havana through Wynwood to the bayfront — a city that keeps reinventing itself, one ocean breeze at a time.