What's the must-see thing in Fort Lauderdale?

Most first-timers head straight for the beach along A1A. Fair enough. But the single place in Fort Lauderdale that will change your trip sits behind a modest entrance on East Sunrise Boulevard. Hugh Taylor Birch State Park covers 180 acres of coastal hammock forest that Chicago industrialist Hugh Taylor Birch donated to the state in 1941. The canopy is dense enough to drop the temperature by 4 or 5 degrees on an August afternoon, when the beach pavement is radiating heat at 41°C. You'll hear mockingbirds and the scratch of gopher tortoises in dry leaves. The park runs from the Intracoastal Waterway to a tunnel that passes under A1A and opens directly onto the beach. That transition, from salt-rotted mangrove shade to open Atlantic in about 90 seconds, is the best single walk in Broward County. Admission is $6 per vehicle or $2 for pedestrians. Go before 9am on a weekday and you might have the freshwater lagoon to yourself.

Las Olas Boulevard is the roughly 1.5-kilometer strip between Andrews Avenue and the Intracoastal that works as the city's living room. The west end, closer to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts and the Riverwalk, is where the galleries cluster. The east end runs through a residential neighborhood where the houses have boat docks instead of garages. On a Friday evening the sidewalk tables along the commercial blocks fill by 7pm. Entrees at the sit-down restaurants here tend to run $18-35. If you're visiting between October 15 and May 15, Florida stone crab is in season. Order it wherever you see it. The claws arrive cold, pre-cracked, with a mustard-butter sauce, and the meat has a texture somewhere between lobster and shrimp. That said, Las Olas gets loud on weekend nights. If you want the walk without the bar-crawl energy, go on a Tuesday.

The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, now operating as NSU Art Museum, was founded in 1958 and sits at One East Las Olas Boulevard in a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. The permanent collection leans into post-1945 American and Latin American work, with strong CoBrA movement holdings and William Glackens paintings. Admission runs $12 for adults. Worth noting, the rotating exhibitions tend to feature Latin American and Caribbean artists you will not see at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami or the Bass on South Beach. That makes the 45-minute drive north worthwhile if you are staying in Miami-Dade. The museum is not large enough to fill a whole afternoon. Allow 90 minutes.

A note on what to skip. Butterfly World in Coconut Creek, founded in 1988, appears on every Fort Lauderdale top-ten list. It is 25 kilometers northwest of the beach in a suburban zone. The aviaries are warm and humid and the butterflies land on your arms, which is impressive if you have children under 10. An adult couple will see everything in 40 minutes and spend another 40 driving each way on the Sawgrass Expressway. For first-timers with 2 or 3 days, stay within the A1A-to-Downtown corridor and ride the Water Taxi loop along the Intracoastal and up the New River. Fort Lauderdale is a canal city. The drawbridges lift every half hour along SE 17th Street. Mega-yachts sit at Bahia Mar. The residential docks have 40-foot sailboats where other neighborhoods have SUVs.