Visit our Tropical Paradise in the American Carribbean

Miami & Miami Beach
- 3rd most popular American city
for international tourists

Miami beginnings.........

Fueled by ever increasing tourism, Miami has evolved from a small town near Florida's Everglades into a world-class cosmopolitan metropolis bursting with attractions, watersports, nightlife and shopping.

White sand beaches, museums, parks, and restaurants of every cuisine tempt tourists from a variety of nations. Our state-of -the-art seaport safely handles more passenger cruise activity than anywhere else in the world.

Miami's boom beginnings date back to an 1895 record freeze sweeping northern Florida. Citrus crops were devastated. Just a few years earlier, South Florida's Julia Tuttle had invested in acreage along the Miami River's north bank and she had besieged Henry Flagler about extending his railroad south. She visited, she wrote, and she wrote again, but Flagler remained aloof.

With the freeze, Tuttle seized opportunity to renew overtures to Flagler, offering a partnership in exchange for stretching his tracks to Miami from northern Florida where the trains regularly deposited wealthy snowbirds at his hotels.

According to legend, Julia shipped fresh-cut flowers from her unblemished garden to the rail magnate along with a “come see for yourself” note.

Flagler did, and railway passenger service to Miami began in April, 1896, bringing huge development to the area. After WWI, the expansion continued not only due to clement weather and miles of attractive beachfront property, but also to gambling and disdain for Prohibition. Despite hurricane devastation, statewide recession, and national depression, the mid-1930s brought construction of Art Deco buildings to Miami Beach.

Prosperity reigned through 1942, when a German U-boat sank an American tanker off Florida's coast helping transform South Florida into a massive military staging area. After WWII, service trainees returned and settled, and so did gamblers and gangsters. When Castro took power in Cuba, Miami's Cuban population mushroomed, jump-starting the region's Latin/Caribbean magnetism with neighborhoods like Little Havana and Little Haiti.

In the 1980s, Miami's dubious reputation as a haven for drug dealing got a positive spin from television's artsy "Miami Vice" TV show starring Don Johnson, putting Miami Beach's Art Deco District on the world stage as a trendy playground for the rich & famous.

The Miami of the 21st century is a major hub for Latin Americans in the US, home to Spanish speaking people from every country in South America and the Carribbean.