Three days in Miami: the northernmost city in Latin America

The first afternoon does not leave the island and barely leaves ten blocks.

The Art Deco Historic District is about eight hundred buildings from the 1920s to the 1940s in a square mile, the largest concentration of the style anywhere, and it exists because a preservation campaign in the 1970s stopped the whole lot being knocked down for towers. Walk Ocean Drive, then walk one block inland on Collins and Washington, where the buildings are less painted and more interesting. Look for the three-part symmetry, the eyebrows over the windows and the rule of three that the architects worked to.

Española Way is two minutes west, a short block built in 1925 as a mock Mediterranean village and now a pedestrianised street of tables under awnings. It is unashamedly pretty.

Then the beach itself, which is genuinely enormous: a hundred metres of sand from the dune line to the water, with lifeguard huts in candy colours that are themselves photographed constantly. The park along the back of it is where the city walks.

Stay for sunset over the bay rather than the ocean, then eat late, because everybody here does.

Cross to the mainland today. Little Havana in the morning, Coconut Grove in the afternoon.

Calle Ocho is Southwest 8th Street and the spine of Cuban Miami. Start with a coffee at a window, then walk east: the Tower Theater, an Art Deco cinema from 1926 that showed subtitled films to newly arrived Cubans learning English and is now a repertory house; the domino park where men in guayaberas play competitively behind a fence and have done for decades; and the cigar rollers working in shop windows.

The Cuban Memorial Boulevard, a few blocks south, is a central reservation of monuments: an eternal flame for the men killed at the Bay of Pigs, a ceiba tree with offerings at its foot, and a series of busts of figures from Cuban history that are entirely unexplained if you do not already know them.

In the afternoon, drive fifteen minutes south to Vizcaya. James Deering built himself a Renaissance villa on Biscayne Bay between 1914 and 1922, filled it with four centuries of European furniture, laid out formal gardens behind it and moored a carved stone barge in the water in front as a breakwater. Roughly a thousand people worked on it, in a town of ten thousand.

Then back over the causeway for dinner, or stay on the mainland and eat in Coconut Grove.

The last morning stays in South Beach, which makes the airport run simple.

The Wolfsonian is the best museum in Miami and almost nobody goes. It occupies a 1920s storage warehouse where wealthy winter residents left their furniture between seasons, and it collects the design and propaganda of the industrial age between 1850 and 1950: posters, machines, furniture, political art. Two hours, and the building itself is worth the ticket.

Ten minutes north is the Holocaust Memorial, which is not a museum and takes twenty minutes and is the thing people remember from this city. A vast bronze arm rises out of the water, tattooed with an Auschwitz number, with a hundred sculpted figures climbing it. It was designed by a local architect and unveiled in 1990, and it is free and open all day.

Then Lincoln Road for lunch, a pedestrian shopping street laid out by Morris Lapidus in 1960 with shade structures and fountains down the middle, before the airport, which is thirty to fifty minutes away depending entirely on the causeway.