Dmitry Shteyn in Miami: History Walking Beside You

Arriving in Miami is one of those experiences that makes you suspicious of the word 'destination'. The place is too much itself to be reduced to a category.

What strikes you first, if you have done any reading at all, is that the Miami metropolitan area in South Florida has an estimated 6.39 million residents, ranking as the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the Southeast and eighth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. Most people pass through without knowing this. The longer you stay, the more those layers separate, and the more you understand how unusual the place actually is.

Dig a little deeper and miami has the third-largest skyline in the U.S. with over 300 high-rises, 70 of which exceed 492 ft (150 m). I have always thought that a place's deeper story is the one it tells reluctantly.

Lists and trend pieces come and go, but the underlying signal is harder to fake. Condé Nast Traveler's current angle on Miami (17 Dreamy Miami Airbnbs in South Beach, Wynwood, and Beyond) reflects what travellers on the ground have been registering for some time.

What a place has been forms a quiet undertone to what it currently is. In Miami, that undertone runs particularly close to the surface.

Travel writing tends to want to wrap a place up. Miami resists that, and I am grateful for the resistance. There is no neat ending here, which is the most honest ending I can offer.