Hours in Miami

• The Freedom Tower is Miami’s first skyscraper, which underwent a two-year, $25 million renovation and reopened in September with an immersive exhibition on immigration.
• Café La Trova is a Cuban-themed cocktail bar and restaurant in Little Havana where diners dance between tables as a band performs old-world Cuban classics.
• South Pointe is a quiet stretch of white sand in South Beach, with a shaded park and a pier that overlooks the busy port.
• Las Rosas is a rock ‘n’ roll bar in the Allapattah neighborhood with live local bands every weekend. The Wolf of Tacos regularly pops up here with its spit roast.

• The Underline is a linear park in the Brickell neighborhood with vintage and farmers’ markets, food vendors, basketball courts and a soccer pitch.
• The Standard is an adults-only resort with a ‘60s vibe, tucked away on the Venetian Islands but still close to South Beach.
• Take an aquatic view of the city with Miami Water Life, a company that leads personal watercraft tours.

• Latin Café 2000 serves traditional Cuban cuisine, with a busy ventanita — a walk-up window where locals gather for Cuban coffee.
• El Mago de las Fritas, in West Miami, and El Rey de las Fritas, in Little Havana, are two restaurants that serve traditional fritas, smashburgers with Cuban street food roots.
• The Cleat is a hidden sunset lookout spot for quiet cocktails in Key Biscayne’s No Name Harbor.
• Hoy Como Ayer is a long-running, late-night salsa club and bar with live music in Little Havana.
• Enriqueta’s serves affordable Miami breakfast and lunch staples, including café con leche with Cuban toast, omelets and sandwiches.
• Pollos y Jarras is a Peruvian restaurant by one of Miami’s most successful restaurateurs, serving rotisserie chicken, ceviches and platters of assorted roasted meat.
• Sunny’s Steakhouse is a grand, new restaurant with an Old Florida feel, named among the New York Times’ 50 best restaurants in America.
• Recoveco is an intimate restaurant with the power to transform humble ingredients into delicious, eye-catching dishes in South Miami.
• Fox’s Lounge lives on as a reimagined version of a dive bar that has been a favorite of South Miami locals for more than 70 years.
• Dante’s Hi-Fi is a Japanese-style vinyl bar and late-night club in Wynwood, co-owned by the Major Lazer D.J. Walshy Fire.
• True Loaf’s pastries, croissants and fresh-baked sourdough bread make it a destination for Miami Beach locals.
• Joe’s Stone Crab is Florida’s second-oldest restaurant, in South Beach, and widely credited for making stone crab claws an annual delicacy.
• Cubatón presses some of Miami Beach’s finest Cuban sandwiches, including a nontraditional one with pickled jalapeños and hot honey.

• Brickell City Centre is an indoor-outdoor mall with some of South Florida’s best shopping and sweeping views of one of Miami’s most walkable neighborhoods.
• Frame Art is the studio-gallery of the celebrated Miami street artist David Anasagasti, who paints under the name Ahol Sniffs Glue.
• Pérez Art Museum Miami is a modern and contemporary art museum, which houses an extensive representation of Caribbean and Latin American art.

• The Shelborne, an Art Deco gem just north of the bustle of South Beach, reopened this year after a $100 million upgrade to turn it into a luxurious Marriott resort. The hotel has a relaxed pool (with a historic diving board preserved in the renovation) and beach bed set ups. Rooms start at about $630.
• The Mayfair House in Coconut Grove reopened in 2022 after a $50 million renovation, highlighting its 1980s-style hanging-garden courtyard. Coconut Grove is close to the highways yet remains one of the most walkable Miami neighborhoods, with the open-air mall CocoWalk, local boutiques, Panther Coffee and two one-star Michelin restaurants, Ariete and Los Félix. Rooms start at about $350 on weekends.
• The Esmé Miami Beach, a former hostel, was converted into a tasteful boutique hotel, washed in pale pinks and greens, at the mouth of the revitalized Española Way, a historic promenade. The area is young, sometimes chaotic, filled with shops and cocktail clubs like Tropezón gin bar, a block from South Beach. Rooms start at about $150 a night on weekends in October.
• Short-term rentals are plentiful in the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. Renting a spot in Miami’s Design District will put you in a period home next to the posh, luxury shopping neighborhood, and also close to downtown, Wynwood, and near two bridges to Miami Beach.

• Miami is a driving city with limited mass-transit options outside Brickell and downtown. A rental car is the easiest way to get around, and there’s little free parking. Sign up for the Pay by Phone app to easily pay parking fees that usually start at about $3 an hour in the city of Miami. Garages are the least expensive way to park in Miami Beach, about half the price of street parking.
• The Metromover offers free elevated rail around downtown and Brickell. The Miami Trolley, which runs 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., offers free bus service that is still subject to Miami traffic. The Miami Beach Trolley, also free, runs 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. solely within the island, with several loops.

3 p.m. Visit a ventanita

Shake off your jetlag at Latin Café 2000. This will be your introduction to the ventanita, the walk-up Cuban coffee windows that are ever-present in Miami, some open all night. A perfect pick-me-up is a cafecito cubano ($1.11), a version of a double espresso with sugar whipped into the first few drops. Pair it with a hearty croqueta de jamon ($1.35). For something more substantial, a Cuban frita is a dish you rarely find outside of Miami: traditionally an all-beef patty, sometimes mixed with pork, smashed on a griddle with onions, topped with fried potato strings, and served on a Cuban roll. Nearby El Mago de las Fritas ($6.50) in West Miami, and El Rey de las Fritas ($5.25) in Little Havana keep this imported Cuban tradition alive.

6 p.m. Catch the sunset with a piña colada

Key Biscayne feels a world away from bustling Miami, a soaring drive over the Rickenbacker Causeway with scenic views of the skyline. The Cleat, at the distal end of the key, past the entrance to Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park ($8 entry), is one of the last low-key places to sit on the water with a cocktail and a stunning view of the sunset. Boaters tie up in secluded No Name Harbor to visit Boater’s Grill for whole fried hogfish (market price). The inlet opens up into a panoramic view of Biscayne Bay, a curving shoreline that glows amber and magenta with the setting sun, silhouetting the city. You’ll angle for selfies with a piña colada ($16) against Miami’s natural beauty, hidden in plain sight.

8 p.m. Dance salsa, eat and drink in one spot

You can have one brilliant, encapsulated night of Cuban Miami culture at Café La Trova, a bar, restaurant and music venue in walkable Little Havana. Diners dance between tables as a band performs old-world Cuban classics and cantineros, like the co-owner Julio Cabrera and his son Andy, salsa in step while mixing impeccably balanced cocktails, from classic daiquiris ($14) to specialties like El Guayabero ($16), tequila with guava marmalade and lime. The James Beard Award-winner Michelle Bernstein created the dishes, like fall-apart mojo pork ($29) and arroz con pollo ($29). Still amped? A Gen Z salsa crowd injects new life into nearby club Hoy Como Ayer, open til 2 a.m, where you’ll find locals squeezing the last bits out of Friday night.

Dominos at “Domino Park,” officially Máximo Gómez Park, in the Little Havana neighborhood.

10 a.m. Fuel up for a proper Miami start

There’s a reason Enriqueta’s sandwich shop in Midtown remains a Miami classic, despite being surrounded by new high-rises. Locals still gather here, even celebrities like David Beckham and Gloria Estefan, who signed menus on the wall. Many come before 11 a.m. for the $7.75 breakfast that includes eggs, bacon or sausage, buttery Cuban toast and a rich café con leche. (You’ll pay an extra $5 after 11.) The tortilla con maduros ($11) is a Caribbean twist on an omelet with sweet, fried plantains. The pan con tortilla Enriqueta ($12) is an omelet sandwich with Serrano ham, bacon and sauteed onions inside buttered and pressed Cuban bread that hangs out of the red plastic baskets. It’s a meal to power a 10-minute walk to nearby shops in Wynwood.

11:30 a.m. Shop indoors, bike outdoors

Brickell is one of Miami’s most walkable neighborhoods and home to Brickell City Centre, a three-level, indoor-outdoor mall where the dramatic, curving architecture is as much a draw as the high-end shopping. Frame Art, the longstanding gallery next door, serves as studio for renowned local street artist Ahol Sniffs Glue, whose sleepy graffiti eyes cover empty walls and discarded items across the city. A rented Citi Bike can take you through the Underline, a linear park beneath elevated rail inspired by New York’s High Line, and across the Brickell Avenue Bridge, over the Miami River, into downtown. (Or take a free, 10-minute Metromover ride). Replenish at the country-style Peruvian restaurant Pollos y Jarras with a classic ceviche ($19) and a platter of assorted grilled meats ($59), including succulent rotisserie chicken.

2 p.m. See two new exhibits downtown

Shadowy figures with piercing eyes emerge from a wilderness, complete with chirping crickets, inside a striking new exhibition, “El Monte,” ($18, through March 2026) in downtown’s Pérez Art Museum Miami. In their first solo show, Miami-born twins Elliot and Erick Jiménez explore the spiritual traditions of Lucumí, an Afro-Caribbean religion prevalent in Miami that combines Catholic, Yoruba and Spiritism. It’s a short walk to the Freedom Tower, the city’s first skyscraper and a national historic landmark that reopened in September, on its centennial, after a two-year, $25 million renovation with a timely permanent exhibition, “Libertad” ($18). Powerful photos, audio stories and interactive videos explore the tower’s role as a refugee aid center for Cubans in the 1960s and a symbol for the wider immigrant experience in Miami.

7 p.m. Dine at a florid new steakhouse or a small, hidden spot

When a breeze swirls through the grand courtyard at Sunny’s Steakhouse in Little River, beneath a graceful banyan tree, and into the incandescent dining room, you’d swear there’s no better place to be in Florida. (Although, it’s a tough reservation). Order a guava cosmopolitan ($16) before dining on unforgettable chicken liver mousse ($17) and spice-crusted duck breast ($49). Recoveco, a nook of a restaurant with a more intimate experience, transforms ordinary into exceptional. Ballyhoo, a baitfish, becomes a crudo of deconstructed artwork, precisely sliced and laid out like an exploded-view drawing with head and fins ($25). Heritage chicken is served dramatically with the claw ($56). Finish across the street at Fox’s Lounge, one of Miami’s oldest bars, resurrected for a new generation, with an after-dinner Manhattan ($17).

10 p.m. Dance where the party is

Dante’s Hi-Fi in Wynwood is Miami’s answer to Japanese listening rooms. Bodies are silhouetted against a low orange glow as the D.J. spins crackling vinyl. After 10 p.m., it comes to full thumping life with bass you feel in your seat. A $50-per-person reservation goes toward drinks like yuzu-whiskey highballs ($16). You’re a $4 Uber from a slice of Miami subculture, rock ‘n’ roll bar Las Rosas. No reservations, just walk in, get patted down, and hear live local bands, like the Boas, rock the paint off the walls on the main stage, under a glowing neon rose. Sip a Las Rosas lager ($6.66!) at the bar playing Bad Bunny, and recover with the city’s best suadero tacos ($6) from Wolf of Tacos.

Peacocks roam areas of Miami, possibly in search of the best Cuban sandwich.

8:30 a.m. Sink into a spa or zoom on the water

The best way to detoxify after a long night in Miami is a day of spa and sun on Miami Beach. Grab a chocolate croissant ($5.50) at True Loaf in Sunset Harbour on your way to the spa at the Standard. The resort kept its ‘60s vibe and refreshed its spa in 2022 with a Turkish hammam, steam room and a sauna overlooking Biscayne Bay. Any treatment over $250 (a $239 hour-long massage plus tip gets you there) unlocks those amenities, including an infinity pool melting into the Intracoastal Waterway, the serene inland channel. For a more active final day, Miami Water Life leads hour-long guided personal watercraft tours ($160), with sights including the historic Vizcaya estate, posh Fisher Island, and South Beach, departing near the iconic Miami Marine Stadium in Virginia Key.

11:30 a.m. Crack into stone crab claws

South Pointe is the locals’ beach in Miami Beach’s quieter South of Fifth neighborhood. You’ll find a mix of families at South Pointe Pier waving to cruise ships sailing from the port, experienced tourists eschewing Lummus Park and surfers riding the break. You’re by Joe’s Stone Crab, Florida’s second-oldest restaurant, at 112, open all year and at its peak during October-to-May stone crab season. Skip the formal restaurant and instead pop into Joe’s Takeaway, the cafeteria next door, for medium claws ($50 a pound, $11 more and they’ll pack them for your flight) and a wedge of Key lime pie ($14). The $8.95 fried half chicken is a locals’ secret. Or finish your Miami trip at Cubatón, with a nontraditional Hot Honey Cuban ($13.50), which subs jalapeños for pickles.