Aventura

Aventura is a young city with an unusually finished look. Development began in the early 1970s on land then known simply as Turnberry, led by Don Soffer and Eddie Lewis, and the city was not incorporated until November 1995 — by which time the golf courses, the marinas and the tower lines along the water were already in place. What grew up here was planned rather than accumulated, and it shows in the landscaping, the private gates and the consistent scale of the buildings.

The city sits in northeastern Miami-Dade with the Intracoastal Waterway and Dumfoundling Bay along its eastern edge and Biscayne Boulevard along its western, a short drive from the beach at Sunny Isles, from Gulfstream Park and from the twelve-acre Founders Park on the water. Aventura Mall, one of the five largest shopping centers in the United States, anchors the commercial core; the JW Marriott Miami Turnberry Resort — Turnberry Isle until its 2019 rebranding — anchors the residential one. Density is high by South Florida standards: the 2020 census counted 40,242 residents on 2.65 square miles of land, more than 15,000 people per square mile.

The population is international and, relative to the rest of the county, older — the median age at the 2020 census was 48. Aventura has a substantial Jewish community and has long drawn buyers from Latin America, Europe and Israel; Spanish, Hebrew and Russian are heard in the lobbies alongside English.

Getting around is done by car, and increasingly by train. Biscayne Boulevard runs to as many as ten lanes through the city, the William H. Lehman Causeway carries traffic east to the beach, and I-95 is about a mile to the west. Buildings here were designed around parking — Aventura Mall alone has close to 10,000 spaces — and the city runs its own free Aventura Express shuttle on three routes alongside the Miami-Dade and Broward county buses. Since December 2022 the Brightline station just west of the mall has put downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Orlando on a rail timetable.