Miami Travel Video Guide

Miami Travel Itinerary

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Far and away the most exciting city in Florida, MIAMI is a stunning and often intoxicatingly beautiful place. Awash with sunlight-intensified natural colors, there are moments - when the neon-flashed South Beach skyline glows in the warm night and the palm trees sway in the breeze - when a better-looking city is hard to imagine. Even so, people, not climate or landscape, are what make Miami unique. Half of the two million population is Hispanic, the vast majority Cubans. Spanish is the predominant language almost everywhere - in many places it's the only language you'll hear, and you'll be expected to speak at least a few words - and news from Havana, Caracas or Managua frequently gets more attention than the latest word from Washington, DC.

Just a century ago Miami was a swampy outpost of mosquito-tormented settlers. The arrival of the railroad in 1896 gave the city its first fixed land-link with the rest of the continent, and cleared the way for the Twenties property boom. In the Fifties, Miami Beach became a celebrity-filled resort area, just as thousands of Cubans fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro began arriving in mainland Miami. The Sixties and Seventies brought decline, and Miami's reputation in the Eighties as the vice capital of the USA was at least partly deserved. As the cop show Miami Vice so glamorously underlined, drug smuggling was endemic; as well, in 1980 the city had the highest murder rate in America. Since then,

though, much has changed for two very different reasons. First, the gentrification of South Beach helped make tourism the lifeblood of the local economy again in the early Nineties. Second, the city's determined wooing of Latin America brought rapid investment, both domestic and international: many US corporations run their South American operations from Miami and certain neighborhoods, such as Key Biscayne, are now home to thriving communities of expat Peruvians, Colombians and Venezuelans.

Your Tips For Miami

• New England USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The six New England states of MASSACHUSETTS, RHODE ISLAND, CONNECTICUT, NEW HAMPSHIRE, VERMONT and MAINE like to view themselves as the repository of all that is intrinsically American. - USA
  

• Texas USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Still cherishing the memory that it was from 1836 to 1845 an independent nation in its own right, TEXAS stands apart from the rest of the United States. - USA
  

• South USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  As Mark Twain put it in 1882, "In the South, the [Civil] war is what AD is elsewhere; they date everything from it. - USA
  

• California USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Publicized and idealized all over the world, CALIFORNIA really does live up to the myth. - USA
  

• Great Plains USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  THE GREAT PLAINS , stretching west of the Mississippi through OKLAHOMA, MISSOURI, KANSAS, IOWA, NEBRASKA and SOUTH and NORTH DAKOTA , are lumped together in the popular imagination as an unappealing expanse of unvarying flatness and conservative "Middle American" values, a huge national joke to be passed through as fast as possible. - USA
  

• Hawaii USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The islands of HAWAII , with their volcanoes , palm-fringed beaches , verdant valleys , glorious rainbows and awesome cliffs , hold some of the most spectacularly beautiful scenery on earth. - USA
  

• Florida USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Brochure images of tanning flesh and Mickey Mouse give an inaccurate and incomplete picture of FLORIDA . - USA
  

• Capital Region USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The city of WASHINGTON DC and the four states of VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA, MARYLAND and DELAWARE constitute a cross-section of the nation. - USA
  

• Mid-Atlantic USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The three Mid-Atlantic states - NEW YORK, PENNSYLVANIA and NEW JERSEY - stand at the heart of the most populated and industrialized corner of the US. - USA
  

• Great Lakes USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Swept by tumultuous storms and traversed by fleets of oceangoing tankers, the interconnected Great Lakes form the largest body of fresh water in the world; Lake Superior alone is more than three hundred miles from east to west. - USA
  

• Louisiana USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Swathed in the romance of pirates, voodoo and Mardi Gras, LOUISIANA is undeniably special. - USA
  

• Rockies USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  Exploring the Rocky Mountain states of COLORADO, WYOMING, MONTANA and IDAHO could literally take forever. - USA
  

• Southwest USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The four sparsely populated Southwestern desert states of NEW MEXICO, ARIZONA, UTAH and NEVADA are extraordinary, unforgettable and unique. - USA
  

• Pacific Northwest USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  The Pacific Northwest states of WASHINGTON and OREGON , while similar in climate, topography and generally liberal politics, are quite different in their attitude toward expansion and progress. - USA
  

• Alaska USA Travel Videos
  USA Travel Itinerary
  No other region in North America possesses the mythical aura of ALASKA ; even the name - a derivation of Alayeska , an Athabascan word meaning "great land of the west" - fires the imagination. - USA