South Beach

South Beach covers the southern end of Miami Beach, the barrier island across Biscayne Bay from the city. It has the largest collection of Art Deco architecture in the world: hundreds of hotels and apartment blocks from the 1930s and early 1940s, with rounded corners, porthole windows and pastel paint, protected since 1979 as the Miami Beach Architectural District.

Ocean Drive is the showpiece. It runs beside the beach, with Lummus Park and the sand on one side and a line of hotels, cafés and bars on the other, their terraces spilling onto the pavement. In the evening the neon comes on and the street becomes the place to see and be seen.

We walked up from South Pointe Park after watching a cruise ship sail out, about twenty minutes along the coast. We felt a little out of our element among the crowds, but the charm was undeniable: this was the Miami we had imagined.