Sunny Isles Beach
A wall of glass towers standing on the sand, the Atlantic rolling in below on a live webcam.
About this view
Sunny Isles Beach is a barrier island about three kilometres long and only a few hundred metres wide, between Haulover Inlet and the Broward county line. In the fifties this strip was motel row, all neon and low-slung Miami Modern; the motels came down through the 2000s and one of Florida's densest beachfront skylines went up on the same sand.
The beach keeps its own timetable below the towers: walkers and metal-detector regulars at first light, umbrellas in rows by mid-morning, kitesurfers whenever the wind gets up. The towers themselves are half the show: glass catching a different colour every hour, and the odd car being lifted up the side of the Porsche Design Tower, which parks residents' cars on their own floor.
Florida runs on Eastern time, and sunrise is the moment here: the sun comes straight up out of the Atlantic in front of the camera, somewhere between 6.30 and 7.15 depending on the season. Winter is the dry, busy stretch; in summer this 24/7 webcam regularly catches a thunderstorm building offshore and clearing the sand in minutes.
