Coconut Grove is Miami's oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood and the one that most closely resembles what the city might have become if it had valued canopy and calm over glass and velocity. The banyan trees that shade the residential streets create a microclimate several degrees cooler than the surrounding city, and the bohemian heritage — artists, writers, hippies, and the counterculture that found a home here in the 1960s and 1970s — survives in the neighbourhood's resistance to the glossy development that has transformed Brickell and South Beach. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the Gilded Age Italian villa on Biscayne Bay, is the neighbourhood's most visited attraction and one of the most extraordinary historic properties in the country.
Ariete provides the modern Cuban-American dining anchor. The bayfront parks offer some of Miami's most accessible waterfront. CocoWalk has been redeveloped with mixed success, but the village core along Main Highway retains the neighbourhood scale that the rest of Miami has abandoned.
Coconut Grove goes to bed early by Miami standards, and this restraint is its distinguishing virtue.