Things to Do in South Beach: A Guide from Ocean Drive

South Beach is small. That is the first thing worth knowing, and the thing most first-time visitors get wrong. The stretch that people mean when they say South Beach runs roughly from 5th Street to 23rd, and you can walk end to end in about half an hour. Almost everything below is within that walk from Ocean Drive.

Start with the beach itself

Lummus Park is the strip of green between Ocean Drive and the sand, and it is the reason the neighbourhood feels the way it does. Cross the road and you are on it. The beach beyond is wide, flat and long, with the lifeguard towers - each one painted differently - standing at intervals down the shoreline. They are probably the most photographed objects in Miami Beach after the hotels.

The water is calmest and the sand emptiest early. If you want the version of South Beach that appears in photographs, walk out before nine. By midday in season the same stretch is a different place entirely, which is its own kind of fun but not the same one.

Walk the Art Deco district

The Art Deco Historic District covers several hundred buildings, most of them built between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, and it is the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere. Ocean Drive is the postcard, but Collins Avenue and Washington Avenue running parallel behind it hold just as much, with fewer people looking at it.

The detail to look for is in the small things: porthole windows, racing stripes, terrazzo floors in the lobbies, and neon that was designed to be seen from a moving car. Much of it was nearly demolished in the 1970s and survives because of a preservation campaign - which is why the buildings are protected today.

Lincoln Road, for the afternoon

Lincoln Road is a pedestrian mall running east to west about a fifteen-minute walk north of Ocean Drive. It is where locals actually shop and eat, and the architecture is worth the walk on its own - it was redesigned in the 1960s by Morris Lapidus, who also designed several of the grand Collins Avenue hotels.

The quieter corners

• Espanola Way - a narrow Mediterranean-revival street a few blocks inland, closed to cars, and a complete change of pace from Ocean Drive
• South Pointe Park - the very southern tip, with a pier, a long walking path and the best view of cruise ships leaving PortMiami
• The Miami Beach Boardwalk - runs north from the low twenties and is the easiest way to walk a long stretch of coast without crossing a road
• Collins Avenue after dark - the neon on the smaller hotels is quieter and better than the strip

Getting around

Walk. It sounds glib, but South Beach is genuinely built for it, and parking here is the single most reliably frustrating part of a Miami Beach trip. If you are going further afield - Wynwood, the Design District, Little Havana - a rideshare across the causeway takes about twenty minutes outside rush hour.