Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

James Deering, of International Harvester money, built Vizcaya between 1914 and 1922 as a winter house and imagined a fictional history for it: a Venetian villa expanded over four centuries by successive owners, so the rooms are deliberately in different periods, furnished with genuine European interiors he bought and shipped whole. Construction employed over a thousand people, roughly a tenth of Miami''s population at the time, many of them Bahamian craftsmen whose work is visible in the coral stone. The stone barge in the bay is carved limestone, purely ornamental. The 1926 hurricane and later storms have battered the gardens repeatedly.