Fort Lauderdale

Pier Sixty-Six Hotel & Marina

17th Street Causeway at the marina, Fort Lauderdale

The spire is back — Fort Lauderdale's 1965 icon reopened in 2025 after a billion-dollar rebuild, rotating Pier Top lounge spinning again over a superyacht marina, with new towers, spa, and restaurant row beneath it. The city's stay of the moment.

The Ritz-Carlton, Fort Lauderdale

Beachfront A1A, Fort Lauderdale

Beachfront luxury's steady hand — the glass crescent across from the wave wall with ocean-view everything, a seventh-floor pool deck over the Atlantic, club-level pampering, and the promenade at the crosswalk. The sure thing on the sand.

Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club

Harbor Beach, Fort Lauderdale (private peninsula)

The family-owned secret at the beach's quiet end — a private half-mile of sand no public access touches, lagoon pools, bocce under the palms, and four generations of the same families returning to the same suites every winter.

The Dalmar, Fort Lauderdale Beach

Flagler Village / Downtown, Fort Lauderdale

Downtown's style address — a 25-story Tribute tower above Flagler Village with design-forward rooms, the Sparrow rooftop's skyline cocktails, and the arts district's breweries and murals at street level. The city stay for the city half of the trip.

Riverside Hotel

Las Olas Boulevard at the New River

Las Olas' own hotel since 1936 — the boulevard's coral-stone grande dame with gas-lantern charm, New River balconies off the executive tower, and the city's best dining mile beginning at the front door. The address for boulevard-first trips.

Bahia Mar Fort Lauderdale Beach

Bahia Mar marina, Fort Lauderdale Beach

The marina village across from the sand — the resort at the yachting complex where the Water Taxi and Jungle Queen board, boat-show ground zero each fall, with beach access over the walkway and the best transit math in the market.

Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach

North beach strand, Fort Lauderdale

The all-suite sleeper — residential-scale suites with full kitchens and ocean terraces in a quiet north-beach tower, a sixth-floor Sky Deck pool over the Atlantic, and luxury that trades lobby theater for square footage.

Fort Lauderdale Water Taxi

The city's floating transit and its best tour in one ticket — all-day hop-on-hop-off boats working the New River and Intracoastal past mega-yachts and mansion rows, with narration that names the owners. The Venice line, ridden properly.

Everglades Airboat Tour

The gator show forty minutes from the beach — airboats skim the sawgrass river west of the city, wild alligators sunning the levees, with the roar, the spin, and the guide who knows every bull gator by name. Florida's loudest essential.

Jungle Queen Riverboat

The 1935 institution — a paddlewheeler churning up the New River past the mansion mile to a private island of BBQ, vaudeville, and gator shows. Gloriously retro, knowingly corny, and somehow still the city's happiest evening.

Carrie B Harbor Cruise

The daytime deep-dive — a replica paddlewheeler running narrated ninety-minute loops through the harbor's working port, the mansion canals, and Port Everglades' cruise-ship row, with the city's sharpest guide patter and no show to sit through.

Fort Lauderdale Beach

Seven miles of the state's most civilized sand — the wave-wall promenade, clear Atlantic water, volleyball and snorkel coves north, café rows across the boulevard, and a beach culture that grew up without losing the tan. Free, all of it.

Las Olas Boulevard

The boulevard that connects everything — a mile-plus of sidewalk cafés, galleries, and date-night rooms running from downtown's Riverwalk to the beach, bridging the canal district where the city's gondola-and-yacht life idles past. Free to stroll, dangerous to browse.

Hugh Taylor Birch State Park

The green mile the condos couldn't buy — a lawyer's beloved barrier-island estate deeded to Florida to spite developers, now 180 acres of hammock trails, a paddleable lagoon, gopher tortoises, and a tunnel under A1A straight to the sand.

Bonnet House Museum & Gardens

The artists' island fantasy — a 1920s plantation-style estate on 35 beachfront acres where painter Frederic Bartlett and his wife Evelyn built a whimsical world of studio murals, courtyard menageries, orchids, and resident monkeys. Tours reveal it room by eccentric room.

Historic Stranahan House Museum

Where Fort Lauderdale began — the 1901 trading post on the New River where Frank Stranahan traded with the Seminole and Ivy taught the frontier's children, restored with its river porch and its founders' triumphant, tragic story intact.

NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale

The city's serious art anchor — a curving Postmodern landmark on Las Olas holding the hemisphere's deepest William Glackens collection, a famous CoBrA trove, and ambitious rotating shows. The grown-up culture stop downtown deserves.

Museum of Discovery and Science

The kids' day that outsmarts the weather — downtown's hands-on science palace with live otters and gators, a hurricane simulator, flight simulators, Everglades ecology done right, and an IMAX-scale theater bolted on. The region's family rainy-day king.

Flamingo Gardens

Sixty acres of old Florida west of town — a 1927 botanical estate grown into a wildlife sanctuary of non-releasable natives: flamingos underfoot, panthers, bobcats, bears, and a walk-through aviary under some of the state's champion trees.

Butterfly World

The first and still the largest butterfly park on earth — Coconut Creek's aviaries hold thousands of free-flying butterflies in tropical bloom, plus hummingbirds, lorikeets that land on you, and the research legacy that repopulated whole species.