A visit to Miami cannot be complete without visiting Wynwood Walls. On a recent trip, a group of friends and I traded sore feet for an open-air buggy and spent an hour weaving through the world’s largest outdoor art gallery with Wynwood Buggies – a small, sustainable tour outfit that’s become one of the smartest ways to take in the neighbourhood.

North of Downtown Miami and west of Miami Beach, Wynwood is a Greater Miami neighbourhood that was once a collection of warehouses. The area has been transformed in recent years into one of the world’s hippest hangouts. Synonymous with the neighbourhood are vibrant murals, which were originally commissioned by the neighbourhood’s visionary developer, Tony Goldman, in the early 2000s. Today, Wynwood’s renaissance is all but complete as the outdoor gallery of striking art continues to evolve. While you can see murals throughout the neighbourhood, the centrepiece here is the Wynwood Walls.

Our guide to view the Wynwood Walls was “Ryan the Wheelbarrow”, a working muralist himself. We were delighted to see a piece of his own work as part of our tour. His encyclopaedic knowledge was shared with us in a thoroughly engaging style that made clear his own passion for the culture.  He turned an hour-long buggy ride into a genuine education in street art history.

Wheelbarrow traced the lineage of the graffiti art back to 1970s New York, where writers like T-Kid 170 pioneered the “wild style” lettering that still gets copied today, and explained how the term “graffiti” itself, borrowed from the ancient practice of scrawling on walls, evolved into something artists like Phase Two redefined simply as “style.” We saw how that DNA travelled: LA’s Old English-and-gangster-influenced lettering, the Miami-based MSG crew’s hyper-legible, entrepreneurial approach (they trademark every mural they paint), and international names who’ve made Wynwood a stop on their world tour.

Some highlights stood out. A photo-realistic Spotify billboard, painted not with spray cans but oil-based enamel and a century-old graphite-transfer paper technique, that a visiting Brooklyn, NY production crew repaints every few months. Trek Six’s ever-changing “Everlasting Bass” mural on the landmark Boombox Building presented with the sad caveat of the possibility of it being demolished in the near future, the property having been purchased by a developer for over USD2m. Really interesting to see were Vhils’ extraordinary chiselled concrete portraits, carved and then finished with controlled explosives.

Ryan didn’t shy away from the neighbourhood’s tensions as he guided us around the neighbourhood – the Visual Artists Rights Act disputes over demolished murals, the wave of developers buying up whole blocks, and Wynwood’s roots as “Little San Juan,” a historically Puerto Rican community whose imprint is still visible in murals honouring figures like Roberto Clemente.

We ended at the oldest surviving mural in Wynwood, G Wiz’s 2009 portrait wall, regularly and recently, painstakingly restored by the same artist, freehand, with nothing but a photograph and a spray can. This work of art thus boasts being the oldest and newest mural in Wynwood.

An hour barely scratches the surface of a district that repaints itself in real time, but with a guide as passionate as Ryan the Wheelbarrow, it felt like far more than a drive-by. 

So, if you’re in Miami, Wynwood Buggies’ tour of Wynwood Walls, with Ryan the Wheelbarrow as your guide, is very much worth booking.