Calle Ocho and Máximo Gómez Park

Little Havana is the largest Cuban community outside Cuba and the most intact. It is not a themed district or a museum: it is a working neighbourhood where the bakery counter still turns out guava pastries at 7am and the domino tables start before lunch.

What to actually look at

Start at the corner of SW 8th Street and Miami Avenue at the Domino Park, the plaza named for the politician Máximo Gómez. On a weekday afternoon you will see men and women playing dominoes on folding tables under the trees, for money, with a circle of spectators and loud commentary. The park is the real-life version of what the trailer shows in Little Cuba.

Two blocks north on SW 8th Street is the Calle Ocho walk, where the awnings, the open front of the bars and the painted storefronts create exactly the dense, hand-painted street the game reproduces. The murals along Biscayne Boulevard at 29th Street are worth the detour.

Food worth stopping for

The pastelito and the cortadito are the two orders that every local would tell you to get, and both are sold from windows you can walk up to. The line for cafecito at the ventanita is the single most reliable way to spend five minutes inside the district rather than photographing it from the car.

Where it sits on our route

Calle Ocho is stop seven on the Miami Vice City small-group tour. We stop at the park, we buy cafecito and a pastelito from the ventanita, and we leave enough time for the domino tables to be the point of the stop rather than a photo behind it.

The best hour of the week to walk it

The district's heart is the diagonal of SW 8th Street between Miami Avenue and Biscayne Boulevard, and the best single hour of the week is Saturday morning, when the fruit and vegetable carts are out and the bakery queue moves slowly enough to talk to the people in it. Come on a Sunday and half the shops are shut, which tells you something about who the neighbourhood is actually for.