At the beginning of the last century, the settlement started to draw the eye of the wealthy who, aside from being allured by the sun, wanted to play a part in Miami’s growth. They began to build mansions on the seafront. People of different descent and from distinct cultures started to arrive in Miami: the first mayor was an Irish Catholic, the majority of the shopkeepers were Jewish, and a community of Bahamians soon arose.

Urban growth seemed unstoppable in the 1920s, and the housing prices quadrupled in just five years. It was during this period that the legendary real estate developer George Merrick established the first apartment complex, Coral Gables, which was soon followed by Miami Springs, Opa-Locka and Miami Beach. Meanwhile, Carl Fisher built luxurious hotels and polo and golf courses to keep the well-off happy.

Properties were continuously changing hands – sometimes even in the same day – and always at higher prices. However, the land boom was cut short by a destructive hurricane in 1926 and the collapse of the Stock Exchange in 1929, the source of the Great Depression.

This concluded the first phase of development.

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Venetian Pool
A limestone quarry provided the materials to build this, one of the most mesmerising public swimming pools in the world. Coral caves and waterfalls decorate it with a genuine celestial beauty, which seems far from anything on earth. Created in 1923 by Denman Fink and Phineas Paist, it is decorated in true Venetian style, combining a cobbled bridge, dreamy water fountains, passages entwined with grapevines and crystal clear waters, which invite you to dive right in. The place to be in Coral Gables during its inaugural years, the Venetian Pool is now the only one of its kind; an ideal spot to escape from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Biltmore Hotel
The Coral Gables community was designed by George Edgar Merrick (1886- 1942), one of the visionaries committed to the urban development of Miami. The Biltmore Hotel is one of the most lavish and spectacular buildings in this area, whose construction cost some ten million dollars. Its most striking feature is the tower, which resembles the Giralda in Seville, while its history is enthralling. In the 1920s – its golden era – the hotel put up a list of celebrities from Al Capone, through to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and US singer and actress Judy Garland.

Used in the Second World War as a military hospital, it was later converted to a hospital for war veterans, which it remained until 1968.

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Although hundreds of acres had been developed by the end of World War I, most people who lived on the Beach still lived in “town,” the area between Biscayne Street, which traversed the southern tip of the peninsula, and Fifth Street.

The owners of most of this property, J. E. and J. N. Lummus, had hired a local character named Doc Dammers to auction off their land from the back of a wagon, and they finally began to have some success when they threw free crockery and pocket watches into the deal.

The Lummuses had come to Miami from a small Georgia town – “Scratch every third Miamian and you’ll find a Georgian,” old-timers say – and they couldn’t give a hoot about Fisher’s plans for a fancy winter resort.

The Lummuses advertised South Beach as a great place for a Miami family to build an inexpensive summertime home, and they welcomed anyone who was white, law-abiding, and could afford the property payments.

Soon a few modest bungalows dotted the empty streets.

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Carl Fisher (in the foto Fisher at the Harlem racetrack, near Chicago, Illinois) was energetic and colorful, a generous, domineereing, daring audacious, profane, hard-drinking, pratical-joker man’s man.

His child bride, Jane, saw her future written on leather pillow in his bachelor digs: “A woman is only a woman, a good cigar is a smoke.” He believed in middle- American values and conventions while routinely ignoring or defying them himself.

He was innovative and instinctively entrepreneunal, pragmatic and brash, a sophisticated business-man and a social diamond in the rough. And he thrived on action. When Fisher was at the peak of his success in Miami Beach he started another resort in Montauk, Long Island.

Why, he was asked, when you don’t need the money? Hell, he said, I just like to see the dirt fly. Fisher didn’t need the money when he began work on Miami Beach; he was already a multi-millionaire from the sale to Union Carbide of his Prest-o-Lite company, which manufactured a headlight that ran on cornpressed gas.

But the challenge presented by Miami Beach, combined with the potential for profit, made the project irresistible.

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Miami’s geographical and cultural position brings a uniqe flavour to the great American tradition of cosmopolitan life.

Largest city of the southern United States, it has become in many ways the northern most city of South America

Up in the gleaming glass and steel skyscrapers of the banking and business districts, the city provides a vital link in financial relations between North and South America.

Down in the streets, the smells and sounds of Miami may recall the delicatessens and supper clubs of New York and New Jersey, strong Cuban coffee and cigars and perhaps the exotic beat o Haitian chants.

This is the place where the sun spends the winter, a sub tropical haven that never seen the snow. Even in January, the coolest month, thermometer average around 74° Fahrenheit, while the trade winds temper the summer highs.

With a good hat and the right lotions, you can enjoy this town all year round.

The city stands at the mouth of the Miami River on the shore of Biscayne Bay.

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One hundred years ago, Miami Beach was au uninhabited peninsula that separated the Atlantic Ocean from Biscayne Bay and the frontier town of Miami.

A fine, white-sand barrier beach stretched along the sea, fringed here and there with coconut palms, the legacy of all abandoned coconut plantation from the 1870s. Caribbean pines grew in the rich soil along a high central ridge in the center of the peninsula, but the rest of the land consisted of hundreds of acres of swamp-thickets of mangroves rising out of oozing black mire, squat cabbage palms, and clumps of a brutal, cactuslike plant called Spanish bayonet.

Like many so-called wastelands, it was rich in annual lite: oysters clung to the roots of the umìangroves: barracuda, mullet, and snapper lived iii a tidal salt creek: heron, ibis, and egrets waded iii the shallows of the bay; ducks fished in the swaulips: and raccoons nibbled sea grapes along the shore.

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Sunday of the Palms (Healthy Pascua) of the 1513 navigator Spanish Juan Ponce de Leòn (photo) touched the coast of Florida with its three ships and taken possession of the new territory in the name of the king of Spain calling it Healthy, in honor of the festivity day. In reality de Leon was to the search of the gold and a territory was pushed thus till the Gulf of Mexico, exploring nearly vergine, covered of forests and polulated from aborigines, generally hostile.

In fact they were killed from arrow during a successive one shipment of 1521.

For approximately 50 years they followed other Spanish shipments, some of which tried to fix in the region of the stable takeovers, until a first appropriation of Ugonotti was had French, immediately destroyed to work dell’ admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés for order of the king of Spain Filippo II. Menendez, name from the governing king of Florida, was the founder of the most ancient stable takeover in North America, the city of St. Augustine (1565).

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