Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
Interesting facts
- In 1987 President Ronald Reagan welcomed Pope John Paul II at Vizcaya during the pope's first visit to Miami.
- In 1994 Vizcaya hosted the first Summit of the Americas, where leaders of 34 nations launched plans for a hemisphere-wide free trade area.
- Behind the Renaissance facade the villa is largely reinforced concrete, built with generators, water filtration, two elevators and a central vacuum-cleaning system.
- The estate's telephone system was the first in what is now Miami-Dade County.
- Deering meant the name partly to honour an early Spanish explorer he believed was called Vizcaya; the navigator he had in mind was in fact Sebastián Vizcaíno.
- In 1971 thieves from New York stole artworks and silver from the villa, including a silver bowl once owned by Napoleon; most of the loot was never recovered.
- Saltwater driven in by the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 killed the historic rose garden, and roses never thrived there again.
- The original estate covered about 180 acres of mangroves and tropical forest; Deering, a conservationist, kept the buildings along the shore to spare the woods.
- Deering liked to watch silent films, especially Charlie Chaplin's, in the courtyard, and the villa later appeared in films such as Ace Ventura and Iron Man 3.
Why it is worth it
Vizcaya is an Italian Renaissance villa transplanted to the shore of Biscayne Bay: a palazzo with an open courtyard, formal gardens with fountains and grottoes, and a stone barge lying just offshore in the bay. It was the winter home of James Deering, an heir to the International Harvester fortune, and remains a vivid record of the wealth and taste of America's Gilded Age.
Deering began building in 1912 and moved in on Christmas Day 1916, arriving on his yacht. The house took shape between 1914 and 1922 under a team led by the designer Paul Chalfin, with F. Burrall Hoffman as architect and Diego Suarez, a Colombian who had trained at Villa La Pietra in Florence, as landscape designer. The facade draws chiefly on Villa Rezzonico at Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto, mixing Veneto and Tuscan models with Baroque touches; the style is usually called Mediterranean Revival. What makes it remarkable is the adaptation to the subtropics: French and Italian garden plans were carried out in Cuban limestone and local coral stone and planted with palms and other species that thrive in the Florida climate. Suarez organised the garden around an artificial mound, with secret, theatre, maze and fountain gardens beyond it. Inside, more than seventy rooms are filled with European decorative arts from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, and the swimming-pool grotto keeps a rare ceiling mural with embedded shells by Robert Winthrop Chanler.
The estate's name refers to the Spanish Basque province of Biscay (Vizcaya), echoing Biscayne Bay, and Deering chose a caravel as the emblem of the house. After his death in 1925 his nieces sold off much of the land, but the villa, the formal gardens and the service village were kept. Miami-Dade County bought the core of the estate in 1952 and opened it as a museum the following year; it is now a National Historic Landmark of about 50 acres, including a strip of native hardwood forest. Hurricanes in 1926, 1992 and 2005 all left their mark on the bayfront house.
Getting there
Vizcaya stands on Biscayne Bay in the Coconut Grove neighbourhood of Miami, Florida, and is served by Vizcaya station on the Miami Metrorail. The nearest airport is Miami International Airport (MIA), about 10 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Venetian Pool 6.4 km · lido
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From the encyclopaedia
The Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, previously known as Villa Vizcaya, is the former villa and estate of businessman James Deering, of the Deering McCormick-International Harvester fortune, on Biscayne Bay in the present-day Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida. The early 20th-century Vizcaya estate also includes extensive Italian Renaissance gardens, native woodland landscape, and a historic village outbuildings compound.
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