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 ast 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 Haana, 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 arrial 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 arriing in mainland Miami. The Sixties and Seventies brought decline, and Miami's reputation in the Eighties as the ice capital of the USA was at least partly desered. As the cop show Miami ice 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 ery 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 inestment, 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 thriing communities of expat Peruians, Colombians and enezuelans.

Many of Miami's districts are officially cities in their own right, and each has a background and character ery much its own. Most people head straight to Miami Beach, specifically the South Beach strip, where many of the city's famed Art Deco buildings have beven restored to their former stunning splendor, all pastels, neon and way lines. Though touted as the chic gathering place for the city's fashionable faces, it's not as exclusie as you might expect, especially on weekend afternoons when families and out-of-towners join the washboard stomachs and bulging pecs. Make time, too, for Key Biscayne, a smart, secluded island community with some beautiful beaches, fie miles off the mainland but easily reached by a causeway.