Coral Gables

Coral Gables sits seven miles southwest of downtown Miami and calls itself the City Beautiful, a name the architecture earns. George Merrick laid it out during the 1920s land boom, incorporated it on 29 April 1925 and wrote Mediterranean Revival style into the original plan, so buildings of every vintage here — the 1926 Biltmore Hotel, the Venetian Pool cut from a limestone quarry in 1924, a new mid-rise off Miracle Mile — are recognizably part of the same city. It is a pedestrian place by Miami standards, and only a few minutes from Miami International Airport.

The University of Miami, founded here in 1925, gives the city a settled population alongside its long-established families and corporate tenants. The 2020 census counted 49,248 residents, 59 percent of them Hispanic or Latino, with Cuban, Colombian and Venezuelan families especially well represented.

Condominium buyers sort themselves geographically. The mid-rises around Miracle Mile, Aragon Avenue and Salzedo Street put the restaurants, shops and theaters within walking distance; the Coral Way corridor holds larger and newer buildings; and the two Gables Club towers on Edgewater Drive and the Deering Bay communities to the south trade the walkable grid for water frontage and golf.