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Miami
Florida's subtropical gateway between the Americas
Miami glitters along the southeastern edge of Florida, a low, flat, subtropical city that has reinvented itself as the financial and cultural capital linking the United States to Latin America. More than six million people fill its metropolitan area, a sprawl of waterfront towers, pastel beach districts, and inland suburbs squeezed between the Atlantic and the Everglades. Built on tourism, real estate, and trade, it is a Spanish-speaking American metropolis, the hemisphere's gateway city, where the cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America have remade the place in their image.
The city sits on a flat limestone plain barely above sea level between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades, a position that gives it beaches and waterways but also makes it one of the cities most exposed to rising seas and hurricanes. The porous limestone bedrock lets seawater seep upward, so sunny-day flooding now creeps into low streets at high tide. Barrier islands, including Miami Beach, shelter the bay, and a subtropical climate brings hot, wet summers and a hurricane season that has repeatedly battered the region. There is virtually no high ground anywhere in the metropolitan area.
Miami incorporated in 1896, the only major American city founded by a woman, the businesswoman Julia Tuttle, who lured the railroad south. It boomed and busted on Florida land speculation, then was transformed after 1959 by waves of Cuban exiles fleeing the revolution, who built a Spanish-speaking economy and remade the city's politics. Later migration from across Latin America deepened that character. Today Miami is a banking and trade hub for the Americas, a center of art, nightlife, and tourism, and a bellwether for how coastal cities will face a warming world.