Miami, also known as “The Magic City,” is situated in southeast Florida, between the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a new world city with a decidedly international flair, known for its diverse culture and ethnicities. As gateway to Latin America, Miami provides glamour, excitement, and sunburn for about 9 1/2-million visitors each year. It takes more than 600 hotels and motels, 7,000 restaurants, 650 churches and synagogues, 40 foreign consuls, and 35 hospitals to cater to the tourists in this sun-drenched conglomeration of 29 separate municipalities.

Put all its fragments together and greater Miami's 2,042-square-mile place in the sun seems like a blazing concoction of suntan oil, sand, glitter, and gilt. But beyond this, Miami is a place of gleaming skyscrapers, more than 3,400 manufacturing firms, 170 banks, and a $500 million agricultural industry. With more than $123 million annually in customs collections and mighty ties in commerce, it is the prime gateway to Latin America.

To most visitors, Miami is an all-encompassing term, including both the city of Miami and its across-the-bay twin, Miami Beach. Actually, each is a separate community and, like most sibling cities, each is vigorously different in personality. Miami is the older; still merry but now more settled and sophisticated. Miami Beach is perpetual youth on a fling.

The city of Miami has a touch of Manhattan to it with its business bustle, its rush hour traffic, and its skyscrapers. This is a city of luxury houses, palm-bordered boulevards, Art Deco architecture, and souvenir shops in the midst of a downtown of new, ultramodern office towers, hotels, condominiums, and shopping malls.

Biscayne Bay serves as the buffer between the two communities. Along this shore, on the Miami side, runs Biscayne Boulevard (Hwy 1), lined with hundreds of stately royal palms--a street where anything from a free glass of orange juice to a $2 million yacht can be casually acquired. The Miami River winds through the heart of the city, and seven causeways form lifelines to the sandy shores of Miami Beach. Another causeway links the mainland with Key Biscayne to the south.

Although favored by climate and geography, Miami remained a remote tropical village of frame houses until Henry Morrison Flagler brought his East Coast Railway here in 1896 and turned his hand to community development. Miami's growth was persistent but unspectacular until the 1920s when the great Florida land boom brought 25,000 real estate salesmen to town. In 1925, downtown property was selling at $20,000 a front foot, and $100 million was spent in construction. The bubble burst with a mighty hurricane in 1926, but Miami had the natural assets to come back strong. The city's growth continues at an unflinching pace today, solidly based on year-round tourism, international commerce and trade, industry, and agriculture. The Port of Miami is the largest embarkation point for cruise ships in the world.