North America
Florida
Subtropical coastlines, the Everglades, art deco beach towns, and the world's most visited theme parks
Beaches & Coast
Gulf Coast white sand, Atlantic surf, and the coral reefs of the Florida Keys.
The Everglades
The largest subtropical wilderness in the US — a slow river of grass unlike anywhere on earth.
Theme Parks
Orlando's park complex is the most visited tourist destination in the world.
Florida is a state of pronounced extremes that somehow coexist: the quietest wilderness in the eastern United States sits within a few hours of the world's most visited theme park complex. The peninsula extends far enough south to feel genuinely subtropical — the light is different, the vegetation is different, and the pace in the Keys or on the Gulf Coast operates on a register that has little to do with the rest of the country. Come between November and April, when the humidity drops and the temperature settles into something consistently pleasant; the summer months are hot, wet, and hurricane-prone, and the heat makes outdoor activity in the middle of the day difficult.
Miami is the state's most complex city and worth time beyond its immediate reputation. South Beach's art deco district — the largest concentration of 1930s architecture in the world — is best walked in the early morning before the strip fills up. Wynwood, north of downtown, transformed in the 2010s from a warehouse district into a street art and gallery neighbourhood that now attracts serious collectors and casual walkers equally. Little Havana and Little Haiti each represent decades of immigration that have given Miami a cultural texture that no other American city quite replicates. The food, shaped by Cuban, Haitian, Colombian, and Peruvian communities, is one of the city's genuine strengths.
The Florida Keys, a chain of islands connected by the Overseas Highway south of Miami, offer some of the best reef diving and snorkeling in North America — the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States runs along their Atlantic side. Key West at the end of the chain has a well-earned reputation for eccentricity and a sunset ritual at Mallory Square that is worth experiencing once. The Everglades, on the state's southwestern edge, are best explored by canoe or kayak along the Ten Thousand Islands — a maze of mangrove channels that shelters manatees, roseate spoonbills, and American crocodiles in a landscape of extraordinary stillness.
Stories from Florida
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Sedona, AZ: Red Rock Country and the Art of Arriving Slowly
Sedona's sandstone formations are so improbably beautiful they look like a film set. The trick is staying long enough to stop noticing that — and start noticing everything else.
Gatlinburg, TN: Where the Smokies Begin and the Crowds Never Quite Leave
Gatlinburg is touristy, loud, and draped in pancake houses — and somehow, the moment you step past the strip and into the forest, none of that matters at all.