Top 5 Most Romantic Cities

Sex, depending on individual perspective and how often you’re actually having some, is either the ultimate party or a Technicolor plague. Miami is sex, a carnal city that has become one big erogenous zone, and sometimes it would be easier for all concerned, visitors and natives alike, if we could just take a pill (not that pill, you fool!) and make it go away.Despite the doll-house charm of Ocean Drive, South Beach feels at moments like the hot bottom of Bangkok, lust everywhere and nowhere at once. The invitation for the opening of Tommy Lee’s Rok Bar featured a shirtless, excessively tattooed Lee holding up a slab of raw beef. Sex may be easy, but love is hard, and appropriate settings are equally tricky. Civilized romantics can find oases at Joe Allen or Pacific Time for dinner, and the Raleigh hotel at almost any hour. As palm fronds wave in the breeze by the Raleigh’s famed pool, it’s easy to imagine Esther Williams cavorting in the blue depths. Beach devotees, meanwhile, can roll right off the sand into one of Ocean Drive’s more sensuous dance clubs.

But Miami is also the American Venice, poised between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, with a series of canals that wind their way through the metropolis. As William Faulkner observed, landscape is character–sometimes a
scary notion for Miami natives–and every visitor is quickly transformed by the ease, pleasure, and pure sensuality of being surrounded by water. Embracing that singularity is simple, with places to rent speedboats, sailboats, and jet-skis all over town. A modest craft will do: it doesn’t have to be one of those vaguely sinister Cigarettes or some other mega-powered vessel of the kind that always seems to be owned by an over-compensating, horny vulgarian with a silicone-slap-happy girlfriend draped across the bow like a mermaid gone wrong.

By boat, Miami Beach is pure romance, one gilded isle after another, a voyeur’s delight. Start on the northwest end of the Beach, in the calm waters of Biscayne Bay, and take in the series of islands that Christo once encircled in pink fabric, precisely capturing the sex-and-fun-through-fluidity essence of the city. Drift down past the paparazzi pay-dirt of Indian Creek and North Bay Road, a gift box of excessively moneyed hideaways: the tiki-hut complex of Julio Iglesias; Carl Icahn’s gleaming Xanadu; and Jennifer Lopez�s sex-to-burn estate, between the Brothers Gibb and sharing the street with love-god Ricky Martin.

On the open bay, head south to the Miami River, which spills out past the towers of downtown. Take a drink at Big Fish, then linger over a dolphin sandwich at Garcia’s while listing Haitian freighters slide by remnants of grit and whimsy such as the penis-shaped pediment on the old East Coast Fisheries building, a nod to the river’s bawdy history. Or keep going, down to Matheson Hammock Park, home to the lagoon-side Red Fish Grill, and end up at the sunset mecca of improbably poised fishing shacks off Key Biscayne. From there, the confectionary skyline of Miami is as beautiful and exotic as Angkor Wat: this is the city through the haze of a softening filter, and as any lover understands, even true romance can benefit from a little distance and proper lighting.

MEET on the beach, of course. No stretch of sand is more promising than that outside the Nikki Beach Club at One Ocean Drive. Spread your towel, make eye contact, and you may eventually wander together right off the sand into this laid-back, elegant club, where you can sip the house specialty mojitos in chaise longues or a private cabana with billowing white curtains.