A 2,400-seat ballet and opera house and 2,200-capacity concert hall hosts four resident companies (Concert Association of Florida, Florida Grand Opera, Miami City Ballet, and New World Symphony), plus a sellout Best of Broadway season.

Art Basel Miami Beach takes place December 2 - 5, 2010.

Art Basel Miami Beach is the most important art show in
the United States, a cultural and social highlight for the Americas. As the sister event of Switzerland's Art Basel, the most prestigious art show worldwide for the past 41 years,
Art Basel Miami Beach combines an international selection of top galleries with an exciting program of special exhibitions, parties and crossover events featuring music, film, architecture and design. Exhibition sites are located in the city's beautiful Art Deco District, within walking distance of the beach and many hotels.

These pastel showcases of the Art Deco style from the twenties, thirties, and forties were in disrepair until the late seventies; their restoration in turn sparked the South Beach renaissance. Today, on the southern tip of Miami Beach, there are approximately 1,000 prime examples listed on the National Register of Historic Places�the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world. The finest examples are clustered on Ocean Drive, Collins Avenue, and Washington Avenue, from Sixth to 23rd streets. The Miami Design Preservation League, the group that spearheaded the restoration, conducts several different tours of the neighborhood Wednesday through Saturday and provides audio for self-guided tours.

With full cooperation from the City of Miami Beach Commission, the present site at Meridian Avenue and Dade Blvd. was designated to receive the Memorial. Kenneth Treister, architect and sculptor, was entrusted with interpreting the Holocaust into a structure which would memorialize its victims, serve as solace to its survivors, and also inform with factual representations in pictures and words of this century's greatest human crime.

Jungle Island (formerly known as Parrot Jungle) used to be an oddball charmer far south of the city, an old rambling park full of squawking, bird-filled cages. Now it's a gleaming, multimillion-dollar family attraction on its own island between downtown and South Beach. The new aviary, home to more than 200 parrots and 3,000 exotic animals such as monkeys and reptiles, has various custom-built environments. The Manu exhibit, for example, mimics a Peruvian mountaintop and has indigenous birds, and the Serpentarium is a good place to see alligators up close (don't miss the albino one). The neighboring Ichimura Miami Japan Garden, also run by the Jungle Island team, is a calm oasis of stone lanterns and boulders, wrapped in a traffic noise-dampening concrete wall and topped by a large, genial Buddha.

Located on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove, Florida, The Kampong contains a fascinating array of tropical fruit cultivars and flowering trees.

The garden is named for the Malay or Javanese word for a village or cluster of houses. Some of the first plantings there came from Indo-Malaysia, brought there by the renowned explorer/horticulturist who introduced these species to the United States and who owned the property in the early 1900s. The collections were expanded and diversified by the next owner, who eventually gifted the garden to the NTBG.

Just west of the downtown business district is this several-block bastion of the city's Cuban community. Calle Ocho, or S.W. Eighth Street, is the heart of the area, and on it you'll find shops with women rolling cigars, salsa music emanating from old record shops, art galleries, coffee shops for a shot of bracing caf� cubano, and the restaurant Versailles. In March, the neighborhood hosts a two-week street festival of art, music, and food (www.carnavalmiami.com/calle8).

In 1998, Martin Z. Margulies along with his longtime curator Katherine Hinds began looking for a suitable space to display the growing collection of photography, video and installation works, and sculpture of the Margulies Contemporary Art Collection. In 1999, the first phase of the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse opened to the public with an event to benefit the Lowe Museum at the University of Miami. After a series of expansions, the Warehouse now comprises 45,000 square feet of exhibition space with set hours each week.