Coconut GroveNeighbourhood Guide

Coconut Grove is the oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood in Miami. The village was founded in 1873 along the western shore of Biscayne Bay — twenty-three years before Miami itself was incorporated in 1896 — and was annexed into the city in 1925, after a brief life as its own municipality. The bayfront, the boats, and the dense canopy of banyan and live oak that arches over the older streets are still the defining materials.

From the Bay View Inn to the village today

The first hotel in what is now Miami opened on this shoreline in 1882, when Charles and Isabella Peacock built the Bay View Inn on the site that became Peacock Park. Bahamian labourers who worked at the inn established Coconut Grove's first Black settlement in the 1880s along Charles Avenue, anchoring a community that still anchors the West Grove. In 1891, Commodore Ralph Middleton Munroe — first commodore of the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club — built The Barnacle on a five-acre hammock above the bay; the house is the oldest home in Miami still standing on its original site.

The Grove today is two things at once: a bayfront village with active marinas at Dinner Key and a residential single-family neighbourhood whose interior streets are quiet, leafy, and unfashionably low-rise. The village core scores 97 on Walk Score — a walker's paradise rating that puts it among the most walkable pockets in Miami — and the housing inventory leans heavily to single-family homes with a tight, mostly low-rise condo market clustered along South Bayshore Drive and around CocoWalk.

It is the closest thing Miami has to a small town. Sailing on weekends, breakfast on Commodore Plaza, the Arts Festival in February — the Grove rewards people who stay long enough to learn its rhythm.