The Biltmore Hotel: Miami's Free National Landmark Everyone Drives Past

The first thing you notice is the tower. Driving the quiet, banyan-shaded streets of Coral Gables, you round a bend and a 315-foot copper-capped spire suddenly fills the windshield — a chunk of medieval Seville parked in suburban South Florida. That's the Biltmore. Most people clock it, assume it's an off-limits luxury resort they can't afford, and keep driving to the beach.

They're half right. Rooms here run into the hundreds of dollars a night. But the assumption that you have to book one to experience the place is the single most expensive mistake in Miami tourism — because almost everything that makes the Biltmore worth seeing is free, or close to it. A century of Al Capone lore, a mob murder, the largest hotel pool in the continental United States, Tarzan teaching swim lessons, and a building that was a hospital and a near-ruin before it became a hotel again. You can walk into all of it without a reservation.

In 2026 the Biltmore turns 100. Here's how to actually see it.

A $10 million bet on a swamp

Rewind to the early 1920s. Coral Gables didn't exist yet — it was the vision of a single developer, George Merrick, who was selling the radical idea that you could build an entire Mediterranean dream-city on the flat scrubland southwest of Miami. The Biltmore was meant to be its crown: the proof that Coral Gables was serious, glamorous, permanent.

Merrick partnered with the Bowman-Biltmore Hotels empire and spent roughly $10 million — an absurd sum in 1925 dollars — to build it. He hired Schultze & Weaver, the New York firm behind some of the era's grandest hotels, and they gave him a tower modeled on the Giralda, the 12th-century bell tower of the cathedral in Seville, Spain. If that silhouette looks familiar from elsewhere in Miami, it should: the same firm used the same Giralda template for the Freedom Tower downtown and the old Roney Plaza on Miami Beach. The Biltmore was the tallest building in Florida when it opened on January 15, 1926.

The opening was a spectacle. Merrick ran special trains down from the Northeast packed with the kind of guests who would, over the next decade, include Babe Ruth, Judy Garland, the Vanderbilts, and a rotating cast of European nobility. For a few golden years, the Biltmore was where the wealthy came to be seen doing nothing in particular, very expensively.

The pool that swallowed the spotlight

Walk out the back and you reach the reason half of America once knew the Biltmore by name: the pool. It holds 600,000 gallons across 23,000 square feet, and it still claims the title of largest hotel pool in the continental U.S. In its heyday it was billed as the largest in the world.

A pool that size wasn't for lap swimming. It was a stage. In the late 1920s and '30s the Biltmore threw aquatic galas that drew thousands — synchronized swimmers, high-divers, and at least one genuinely unhinged act: a four-year-old named Jackie Ott who jumped from an 85-foot platform. Alligator wrestlers performed poolside. And the resident swim instructor was a young athlete named Johnny Weissmuller, who set world records in that water before Hollywood cast him as Tarzan. Esther Williams, the swimmer who turned aquatic ballet into MGM box-office gold, performed here too.

You can't swim in it as a walk-in — pool access is reserved for hotel guests, members, and anyone who books a poolside cabana (those start around $240). But you can stand at the rail and look, and on the free tour you'll get the full carnival history. If your trip is built around water, the Biltmore is a story stop rather than a swim stop; for the actual swimming-in-history experience, Merrick's other masterpiece, the coral-rock Venetian Pool a few blocks away, lets anyone buy a ticket and jump in.

Al Capone, a card game, and the ghost on the 13th floor

Now the part the ghost-tour crowd comes for. During Prohibition, the Biltmore's upper floors allegedly hosted a speakeasy and casino, and the suite tied to that lore — the Everglades Suite, still nicknamed the Al Capone Suite — is where the gangster supposedly held court.

The murder is better documented than the speakeasy. In March 1929, a New York mobster named Thomas "Fatty" Walsh — a former bodyguard to gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, and an associate of Lucky Luciano — was running a gambling party on an upper floor. An argument over a debt (and, by some accounts, a mocked lisp) ended with Walsh shot dead, reportedly on the 13th floor. The shooter was never convicted. Walsh, the legend goes, never checked out.

Ever since, Biltmore staff have traded the same stories: the elevator that stops on the 13th floor with no one inside and no button pushed, lights that flicker, doors that open on their own. A few of the guides who've worked here for decades will tell you, deadpan, that they've stopped being surprised by it. Is any of it real? Take it for what it is — a hundred years of folklore stacked on top of an actual unsolved killing, polished by every Halloween ghost tour that's come through since. It's free to enjoy either way, and the history-soaked corner of Coral Gables the hotel anchors leans into its own ghost stories every October.

From grand hotel to military hospital to ruin

Here's the chapter most visitors never hear. When the U.S. entered World War II, the War Department took the Biltmore over and converted it into the Army Air Forces Regional Hospital. The Giralda tower became a lookout; the glamorous floors filled with wounded servicemen. After the war it stayed a Veterans Administration hospital — and the University of Miami's medical school used the building — all the way until 1968.

Then it just... closed. For most of the 1970s the Biltmore sat empty, water-stained, and rumored-to-be-condemned, a derelict castle moldering in the middle of an affluent neighborhood. The city of Coral Gables eventually took ownership, and after a long restoration the hotel finally reopened — as a hotel again — in 1987, more than half a century after its debut. The murals you'll see on the tour, the painted ceilings, the lobby's scale: much of it is restoration work, faithful to what the war years and the empty decade nearly erased.

How to visit without booking a room

This is the part worth bookmarking. The Biltmore is a working luxury hotel, but it's also a National Historic Landmark, and the public-facing pieces are genuinely accessible:

What	Cost	When	Notes
Self-guided lobby + grounds	Free	Daytime	Walk in, wander the courtyard and corridors
Dade Heritage Trust history tour	Free	Sundays, 2pm	Meet at the lobby fireplace; register ahead, ~20 spots
Afternoon tea	From ~$72	Wed–Sun, 1–3pm	Royal Tea ~$95; reservations required
Sunday brunch	~$125/person	Sundays, 10am–3pm	The famous champagne spread; reserve well ahead
Poolside dining	À la carte	Daytime	Eat by the pool as a non-guest (no swimming)
Biltmore golf course	Public greens fees	Daily	Donald Ross 1925 design, city-run, open to all

The free Sunday tour is the move. Dade Heritage Trust, a local preservation nonprofit, runs it every Sunday at 2pm — you meet your guide at the fireplace at the east end of the main lobby, and they walk you through the architecture, the Capone lore, the war years, and the pool. It's free, it's about an hour, and it caps around 20 people, so register through their Eventbrite page instead of gambling on a walk-up.

Getting there and parking. The address is 1200 Anastasia Avenue, deep in residential Coral Gables — roughly 20 minutes from downtown Miami and 25 to 30 from South Beach with normal traffic. This is firmly a drive-here destination: there's no rail station within walking distance, and the closest you'll get on transit is Metrorail to Douglas Road and a short rideshare from there. The hotel has valet and self-parking onsite, both paid, but if you're only doing the free tour and a wander, the metered street parking on the surrounding blocks is usually the cheaper play — just read the signs, because Coral Gables enforces them. Arrive 15 minutes early to find the fireplace and check in before the guide starts.

That golf course deserves a footnote too. The 18 holes were laid out by Donald Ross in 1925 and thread through canals that once floated guests in actual Venetian gondolas down to Biscayne Bay. It's now a public municipal course run by the city, which means a Coral Gables retiree and a visiting golf nerd play the same Ross design for the same greens fee.

The centennial — and the fight over it

Visit in 2026 and you'll catch the Biltmore mid-celebration: a full slate of centennial events marking 100 years to the day since Merrick's 1926 opening. You'll also be walking into a quiet local controversy.

In late 2024, ground-floor renovations — marble slabs over the original dark tile, white paint and mirrored glass over historic ceiling beams — drew real anger from Coral Gables residents, who see the building as civic property the operator merely leases. "If you rent your house today, you will not expect the renters to change what's inside of it without asking," longtime resident Maria Cruz told the city commission, calling the Biltmore "our crown jewel." The city issued a notice of default; preservationists pushed for a full walk-through. It's the kind of fight that only happens around a building a city genuinely loves — and it's a reminder that the Biltmore isn't a museum frozen in amber. It's a living, contested, occasionally-repainted landmark.

Worth it? Yes — but be smart about it

I'd skip paying $125 for the brunch unless a celebration justifies it; the food is good, not transcendent, and you're mostly paying for the room you're sitting in. The afternoon tea is the better-value splurge if you want to linger indoors in the grandeur.

But the free version is one of the best hours in Miami. Roll the Biltmore into a Coral Gables afternoon — pair it with the Venetian Pool and a meander down the Miracle Mile, or slot it next to a Vizcaya visit for a full day of Gilded Age South Florida. If you're mapping a tighter trip, our 3-day Miami itinerary can tell you where it fits.

Just don't do what the windshield tourists do — clock the tower, assume it's not for you, and drive on. It's a hundred years old, it's a National Historic Landmark, and on a Sunday at 2pm, it's free.