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Long before any of it, Biscayne Bay was home. The Tequesta people lived at the mouth of the Miami River for thousands of years before European contact, fishing the bay and the reef line from a village that stood where downtown towers stand now. The city’s name is older still — from Mayaimi, the old name of the great lake inland and of the people who lived beside it, carried down to the river and the bay. The Spanish arrived in 1513, the British held Florida from 1763 to 1783, and the territory passed to the United States in 1821, with Florida becoming the 27th state on March 3, 1845. Successive removals pushed the Tequesta and their successors from the river they had held longest — a loss the city’s history owes its first debt to. Miami remains the only major city in the mainland United States to sit in the tropical climate zone.
The 1920s land boom built the city’s defining architecture in the space of a few years. James Deering’s Italian Renaissance winter estate rose on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove by 1916, ahead of the wave. The Freedom Tower opened on Biscayne Boulevard on July 26, 1925, modeled on the Giralda bell tower of Seville’s cathedral. And George Merrick laid out Coral Gables, the Mediterranean Revival planned city of 1925, with its coral-rock Venetian Pool of 1924 at the center. Boom Miami was building a fantasy of the Mediterranean on a tropical bay — and calling itself the Magic City with a straight face, because the growth really did look conjured.
Why People Visit Miami Florida
Miami offers a founding story with an orange blossom at its center, a refugee tower that welcomed the community that remade the city, cafecito through walk-up windows, boom-era Mediterranean fantasies, and tropical light on Biscayne Bay. Visitors come for Little Havana, the Deco-era heritage, the bay, the Everglades at the back door, and the winter that made the city famous. Magic City since 1896.