Where we go

Wynwood began in 1917 as a working-class subdivision wrapped around garment factories and produce warehouses. For most of the 20th century it was a blue-collar neighborhood, home first to Puerto Rican families - it was known as Little San Juan - and to the fashion trade that filled its long concrete blocks.

The factories emptied out in the 1980s and 90s and the blank warehouse walls sat waiting. In 2009 developer Tony Goldman turned six of them into the Wynwood Walls, inviting international muralists to paint them. The idea spread street by street until the whole district became a rotating outdoor gallery.

Today those same walls are repainted constantly, so no two visits look alike. Between them you will find breweries, galleries, coffee roasters and the murals our guide will walk you through - including the pieces that started it all.

After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, hundreds of thousands of exiles arrived in Miami. Many settled in the modest 1920s bungalows just west of downtown, and within a decade the neighborhood was speaking Spanish, opening bakeries and cigar shops, and calling itself Little Havana.

Southwest 8th Street - Calle Ocho - became its main street. Domino Park opened in 1976 and is still full of players every afternoon. The Tower Theater, a 1926 movie house, began subtitling Hollywood films in Spanish for new arrivals and remains a neighborhood landmark.

On our walking tour you will smell the coffee windows, watch cigars hand-rolled the traditional way, and see the Bay of Pigs memorial - a reminder that this street is as much a monument as a marketplace.

Biscayne Bay is the reason Miami exists. Henry Flagler's railroad reached this shoreline in 1896, the city was incorporated months later, and the waterfront became its harbor, its front door and its playground.

The land around today's Bayside was Miami's original port and, from 1925, Bayfront Park - a Depression-era gathering place designed on land dredged from the bay itself. Bayside Marketplace opened on the northern edge in 1987 and turned the docks into an open-air market of shops, music and boat slips.

It is where our boat tour leaves from. From the water you get the classic view: the downtown skyline behind you, the cruise port to the south, and the celebrity homes of Star Island straight ahead.

William and Mary Brickell opened a trading post on the south bank of the Miami River in 1871, doing business with Seminole traders and the handful of settlers who lived here. Mary Brickell later helped convince Flagler to bring his railroad south, effectively founding the city.

By the 1910s Brickell Avenue was Millionaires' Row, lined with mansions and royal palms. The mansions gave way to banks in the 1970s and 80s as Miami became the financial gateway between the United States and Latin America.

Now it is a canyon of glass towers with a nightlife scene to match. Our night tour works its way through the bars and rooftops here, with a free drink waiting at every stop.

Until 1913 this was a mangrove sandbar reachable only by boat. Carl Fisher dredged and filled it into an island resort, and the 1926 hurricane and the Depression cleared the way for a building boom of small, cheap, brightly detailed hotels.

That boom left the world's densest collection of Art Deco architecture - roughly 800 protected buildings of pastel curves, porthole windows and neon, saved from demolition in the 1970s by preservationist Barbara Baer Capitman.

It is also our home base: all five pickup points sit along Collins Avenue, so your day starts with a walk of a block or two, not a taxi ride.

The Everglades is not a swamp but a river - fifty miles wide and inches deep - flowing slowly from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. Writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave it the name River of Grass in 1947, the same year it became a national park.

It has been home to the Miccosukee and Seminole peoples for centuries; both retreated into these wetlands during the Seminole Wars and built a life on tree islands that no army could reach. Their communities still line the Tamiami Trail today.

Half of the original wetland was drained for farming and development in the last century, making the surviving park one of the largest restoration projects on earth. On the airboat you will cross sawgrass prairie and see alligators, herons and turtles in the wild.

Key West was for decades the richest city per capita in the United States, built on wrecking - salvaging ships that ran aground on the reef - plus sponging and Cuban cigar factories that employed thousands of exiles in the 1800s.

Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad connected it to the mainland in 1912 and was destroyed by the 1935 Labor Day hurricane; its bridges were rebuilt as the highway you drive down today. In 1982 the island mock-seceded as the Conch Republic in protest of a border checkpoint, and it has cheerfully leaned into that independence ever since.

Ernest Hemingway wrote here through the 1930s, Duval Street still runs bar to bar from gulf to ocean, and the Southernmost Point marker sits just ninety miles from Havana.