Miami

The sand is this wide because of a 1970s project that pumped it up from the sea floor. The seabed falls away so slowly that a long walk out still leaves you waist deep. The painted lifeguard huts replaced earlier ones a hurricane took in 1992.

Some eight hundred buildings from the 1920s to the 1940s stand inside one district. Residents stopped the demolitions in the 1970s and had the area protected. The pinks and turquoise you notice now are not original; a designer painted them on in the 1980s.

The main street of Little Havana, settled from the 1960s by people who left Cuba. Domino tables in the park along it are open to city residents of fifty-five and over, so only older hands sit there. A few shops still roll tobacco leaf by hand behind glass.

A farm machinery fortune built this winter house in 1916, with whole rooms lifted out of Europe and fitted inside. Out in the water a barge carved from stone sits as a breakwater. In the high tide months the sea reaches the garden lawns and closes paths.

It is not a lake but a very slow sheet of shallow water over sawgrass. Depth runs ankle to knee, so nothing but a flat boat with a propeller on the back gets in. Alligators hold the fresh water and crocodiles the brackish south. Nowhere else carries both.

Raised in 1825, wrecked and rebuilt in 1846, the white brick tower is the oldest structure left standing in this county. The top is reached only on a guided climb at set hours, never on your own.

The pink and blue market hall at the heart of the district copies the iron market of Port-au-Prince. Shops selling herbs and charms sit along the side streets, and the signs are written in Creole.

A coral rock quarry was turned into a swimming pool in the 1920s, so the floor and walls are rough stone. No chemicals go in; water comes from an aquifer well, drained and refilled every night through summer. Nothing heats it, so in midwinter it stays cold.

It was built in 1925 as a newspaper headquarters. From 1962 to 1974 arrivals from Cuba were processed, examined and issued rations inside it, and that period gave the building its name. A college owns it now and runs it as exhibition space.

Water covers over nine tenths of it, so there is almost no ground to walk in on. A boat is the way there, and shallow channels split between mangrove roots. Six wrecks on the bottom are linked as a route, and divers work through them one after another.

It began in 2009, when a property developer handed old warehouse walls over to painters. Part of the courtyard is repainted each December around Art Basel, and the murals carry on along the warehouse alleys outside.

Rebuilt on the edge of Biscayne Bay in 2013. Dozens of planted columns hang from its deep canopy roof, so the shaded veranda catches the sea breeze and makes a place to rest above the bay.

A lone Latvian immigrant spent over 20 years cutting 1,100 tons of coral rock into this garden, and never said how he moved it. A 9-ton stone gate once swung at a finger's push. It sits in Homestead, about an hour south of downtown.

Opened in Coral Gables in 1938, it is unusually rich in palms and cycads. A separate glasshouse is full of tropical butterflies. Shade runs short at midday, so a morning visit spares you the hottest hours.

South Beach's shopping street, turned into a car-free promenade by the architect Morris Lapidus in 1960. His wavy concrete shade structures and pools still stand down the middle, so it offers more shade than the beach side.