Miami looks new, but its bedrock holds a Tequesta ceremonial circle, a Spanish mission site and a fort from the Second Seminole War. Add Gilded Age villas, a segregated Overtown jazz strip and Cold War exile monuments, and three days barely covers it.
A 38-foot ring of 24 basins cut into oolitic limestone by the Tequesta around 2,000 years ago, discovered in 1998 when a condo demolition exposed it. Public outcry saved it; it is now a National Historic Landmark park at the Miami River mouth.
The 1840s coral-rock slave quarters of the Fort Dallas plantation, used as barracks during the Second and Third Seminole Wars, dismantled and rebuilt here in 1925. Beside it stands the 1844 William Wagner House, Miami-Dade's oldest surviving home.
The Smithsonian-affiliate covering 10,000 years of South Florida, from Tequesta and Calusa artefacts to Seminole patchwork, Flagler's railroad and Mariel boatlift rafts. Two buildings on the Cultural Center plaza, roughly 30,000 objects on rotation.
The Cistercian cloisters of San Bernardo de Sacramenia, built in Segovia in 1141, bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1925, shipped in 11,000 numbered crates and reassembled here in 1954. The oldest European-built structure in the Western Hemisphere.
James Deering's 1916 Italianate villa, built by a workforce of about 1,000 — a tenth of Miami's population — with 70 furnished rooms of European antiques and 10 acres of formal gardens fronting Biscayne Bay and its stone barge breakwater.
The 1971 memorial to Brigade 2506, the exile force defeated at Playa Girón in April 1961, with an eternal flame and the names of the 100-plus men killed. Cuban Memorial Boulevard behind it holds monuments to Antonio Maceo and the Brothers to the Rescue pilots.
The 1899 coral-rock and wood homestead where George Merrick grew up before laying out America's first planned Mediterranean Revival city in 1925. Restored to its 1920s appearance with original Merrick family furnishings and his mother's paintings.
A 1924 swimming pool carved from the coral quarry that built Coral Gables — 820,000 gallons of spring water, caves, waterfalls and a Venetian bridge. The nearby Douglas Entrance of 1927 was Merrick's grand Spanish gateway to the city.
The 1913 theatre at the heart of 'Little Broadway', where Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole played after being barred from sleeping in Miami Beach hotels. Restored in 2014 and now home to the Black Archives of South Florida.
The Bahamian labourers who built early Miami settled here from the 1880s; their shotgun houses line Charles Avenue, and the 1890s Charlotte Jane Memorial Park Cemetery holds the graves of the settlers who cleared the hammock for the Peacock Inn.
The 2006 complex modelled on Port-au-Prince's Marché en Fer, anchoring the neighbourhood that took in tens of thousands of Haitians after 1980. Galleries, a theatre and archives document boat arrivals, vodou art and Creole-language activism.
Charles Deering's 1922 Stone House and the 1896 Richmond Cottage sit on a site with a Tequesta burial mound, a Paleo-Indian solution hole dated to about 10,000 years ago, and the old Cutler settlement road cut through the pine rockland.