Miami in One Day: Biscayne Boulevard

Downtown Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard runs past a boat tour of Millionaire’s Row from Bayside Marketplace, an aquarium and an art museum side by side in Museum Park, the 1925 Freedom Tower and Bayfront Park, all connected by a free elevated people mover.

Millionaire’s Row by boat from Bayside Marketplace

Bayside Marketplace is the open-air shopping center wrapped around a marina at 401 Biscayne Boulevard, and its dock is where downtown Miami’s sightseeing boats tie up. The standard trip is a 90-minute narrated cruise, in English and Spanish, leaving roughly every hour from late morning into the early evening. It loops out past the cruise ships berthed at the port, Fisher Island and the mansions on Star Island, then turns back for the view of the downtown skyline from the water. Tickets for the Biscayne Bay boat tour can be booked ahead, which saves queueing at the kiosks along the dock.

The waterfront walkway around the marina is free and open whether or not you board, with the shops and bars of the marketplace set back behind it.

Hammerhead sharks at the Frost Museum of Science

The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science stands at 1101 Biscayne Boulevard in Museum Park, the bayfront green it shares with Pérez Art Museum Miami, and moved to this building in 2017. Its aquarium holds 500,000 gallons over three levels: you start on an open-air deck looking down into the main tank and work your way down past its windows to a 31-foot glass lens set into the bottom, where hammerhead sharks, rays and whole shoals of fish pass over your head.

One ticket covers the exhibitions, the aquarium and a show in the planetarium, whose 67-foot dome tilts forward so the picture fills your field of view. Adult tickets start at $29.95, and an entry ticket for the museum and aquarium can be bought before you land. Planetarium seats are handed out inside on a first-come basis, so claim a show time on the way in rather than after the aquarium. The museum opens at 10am every day of the year and closes at 5pm or 6pm depending on the day, and doing the aquarium and one show without rushing takes a couple of hours.

The veranda under Pérez Art Museum Miami

Pérez Art Museum Miami sits at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard on the bay side of Museum Park. Herzog & de Meuron designed it, and it opened in December 2013: the galleries are raised on stilts under a wide shading canopy, which turns the ground around the building into a covered veranda facing Biscayne Bay, with broad stairs running down toward the water. Hanging from the canopy are 67 tall columns that the botanist Patrick Blanc planted as vertical gardens. After years of irrigation trouble the museum re-covered them between 2022 and 2023 with mostly artificial greenery and a few live orchids, which is what you see from the veranda now.

The veranda, the stairs and the park around them are free to walk through. Inside, adult admission is $18, free on Thursdays from 5pm to 9pm, and the museum is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The veranda also works as shelter in the wet season, roughly June to October, when a short afternoon thunderstorm is close to a daily event and getting under cover is quicker without a suitcase in tow.

The Freedom Tower, where Cuban exiles were received

The Freedom Tower stands at 600 Biscayne Boulevard, on the inland side of the boulevard, a cream Mediterranean Revival tower built in 1925 as the headquarters and printing plant of The Miami News, with a belfry modeled on the Giralda in Seville. From 1962 to 1974 the federal government leased it as the Cuban Assistance Center, where people leaving Castro’s Cuba were processed, given medical and dental checks and set up with relief aid, which is why it’s called the Ellis Island of the South. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2008.

Miami Dade College owns the building and reopened it as a museum in September 2025, after a two-year, $25 million restoration. It opens Wednesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm, general admission is $18, and entry is by timed ticket, so buy one ahead rather than turning up. Looking at the tower from the bay side of Biscayne Boulevard costs nothing.

Isamu Noguchi’s Bayfront Park

Bayfront Park runs along Biscayne Bay at 301 Biscayne Boulevard, immediately south of Bayside Marketplace. The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi led its redesign from 1980, laying out 32 acres of lawns, palm groves and paths, and it’s open daily from 7am to 11pm with no charge to walk in. The Mildred and Claude Pepper Fountain on its bay side reopened in February 2025 after a $5.5 million renovation and now runs more than 800 synchronized jets with color-changing lights. At the park’s northwest corner, the Torch of Friendship has burned since 1960 as a welcome to arrivals from Latin America and the Caribbean, and was rededicated to John F. Kennedy in 1964.

For a half day further out, Everglades airboat trips and Miami city tours that pick up downtown are listed on a tours and activities platform.

The airport train becomes a two-stop shuttle at weekends

The free Metromover, which runs 5:30am to 10pm and stops beside Bayfront Park, Museum Park and the Freedom Tower, brings you back to Government Center, the downtown Metrorail station. On weekdays the Metrorail Orange Line runs from there to the Miami International Airport (MIA) station in about 15 minutes, seven stops, every 15 minutes or so, for a flat $2.25. On Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays it doesn’t: the Orange Line runs only as a two-stop shuttle between the airport and Earlington Heights, so take the Green Line from Government Center and change there. From the airport station the free MIA Mover takes about four minutes to the terminals.

Door to door, with the people mover and the waits between trains, the trip comes to about 45 minutes, so leaving Government Center three hours before an international departure covers the ride, check-in and security comfortably. For a flight out of Fort Lauderdale instead, the Miami airport to Fort Lauderdale airport guide covers the commuter train between them. MiamiCentral, the Brightline station for trains north to Orlando, is next door to Government Center. Collect the bag last, on the way to the station, and the only thing carried up to the platform is whatever you picked up at Bayside.