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Miami-Dade is known for its postcard destinations and summer-like weather year around. However, hidden in plain sight are years of history and alongside are individuals fighting to keep the community’s intricate story alive.
Daniel Ciraldo, former executive director of the Miami Design Preservation League, highlighted Carolina Isabela as among the best in preserving and highlighting the community’s history.
“She [Ms. Isabela] has an incredible program of social media outreach,” said Mr. Ciraldo, “and she educates on different historic sites throughout South Florida in both English and Spanish. It’s a fresh take that engages the next generation of residents and visitors and gives me hope for the future.”
Ms. Isabela, born in Colombia, came to Miami at age 3. Her passion for history and tour guiding began when she was in college studying business and saw an ad to be a tour guide.
“I saw an ad on Craigslist,” she said, “and I was looking for a change in my life. I was working in an office where I just wasn’t really very happy there. I was going through Craigslist for jobs, and I saw ‘No experience needed. We’ll train you. Be a tour guide in South Beach,’ and I thought ‘That sounds like fun,’ so I applied, and they hired me.”
Once she began training for the job, she noticed how much she enjoyed it and found herself excited to do her own tours.
Ms. Isabela said she puts her heart into what she does.
The tour-guide job she’d applied for focused only on Miami Beach’s history, she said. “I did not realize that Miami Beach had so much of a story to hear, and it made me really excited to tell the story to people.”
Her first tour was impromptu due to her being the only guide available. Without hesitation, she took four ladies on a tour.
“I was just spewing all this information that I just learned, super excited about it,” she said. “At the end of it, they were like, ‘Wow, how long have you been doing this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, this was my first time.’ They were like, ‘What?’”
She continued as a tour guide through college. Despite the years passing, she was still enjoying what she did. This differentiated her tour-guiding job from previous jobs.
“I think that was really big,” she said, “because I have had other jobs before, and after a couple months, I would – even if I found it exciting in the beginning, like the excitement immediately dropped. But with tour guiding, the excitement never, ever stopped.”
Ms. Isabela began guiding when she was 20; now she’s 29.
Three months after graduating from college in December of 2019, the pandemic took over. She began content creation in which she would highlight Miami’s history.
“My friends really enjoyed it,” she said, “my family really enjoyed it, because now they were finally getting to learn all these things that I would tell tourists and that tourists know about, but not even people that have lived here their entire life, they don’t know about.”
She began to work in the corporate world while trying to keep her content creation afloat.
“I never saw tour guiding, or even content creating, as my future career,” she said. “It was always in my mind, like, as soon as I graduate, I’m going to get a big girl job and go into corporate, and that was the plan. I did go into corporate for a year.”
Her first three months in sales, she said, were exciting. She enjoyed talking to people.
“By the end of that year that I worked in corporate,” she said, “I was generating about $120,000 in revenue a month for the company. But I absolutely hated my life. Every day I woke up with an incredible dread…. You have no life in corporate. Your life is corporate. I’m just not that type of person to like – that was not in the plan. The plan was to have a job, but not to have a job as my life.”
In January 2022 during covid she resigned to venture out on her own while freelancing.
During this time, Miami was the only city in the US that was opened, she said. “A lot of people were traveling here, and I decided at that point, ‘All right, I’m jumping ship, and I’m going to work freelance for the companies that I’ve worked with for many years. I’ll work with them, and then I’ll also try and find my own clientele, open up my own business and continue creating content.”
Ms. Isabela said it has been the best decision she’s ever made. She has clients for tour guiding as well as for content creation, and is able to balance the two.
“I’m able to put all my love and passion into both things, and I’m super grateful for it, super happy,” she said. “I never thought that I would continue doing this as a career after getting my degree, but I feel really fortunate to have found it so early on, and I hope to just continue to grow it and make as much of an impact as I can to teach people about Miami’s history and to also just try to create more of this positive energy.”
Miami has a lot of culture and arts, she said, and by continuing to spotlight and support it, it can only grow from there. That is the goal of her Caro the Tour Guide page. “I like to only promote history and culture and arts, and I just hope to try and help steer Miami in a positive way…. That’s my ethos of doing everything that I do, and being from here and growing up here, I feel really passionate about it.”
Ms. Isabela said she does many tours in which people are visiting for business and don’t “really ever leave their hotel, except for these little trips that are planned by the company, and one of those is usually a city tour. My goal for these tours is to get these people to come back, but not on business.”
Ms. Isabela’s private tours are customizable to the person’s liking.
education in both English and Spanish.
“The best way to explain it is that I am your local friend here in Miami,” she said as she explained her tours, “and whatever it is that you want to do we’ll just get done. I don’t have a specific and only one set of things that I do.” A custom tour is created to “fit their needs and their wants so they can have the best time here in Miami.”
Ms. Isabela highlighted individuals who are making an impact in preserving and highlighting the community’s history.
“It goes without saying,” she said, “Dr. Paul George is the OG [original] and he’s someone to really be inspired by as a tour guide, and also another tour guide named Cesar Becerra. He’s written several books from Miami, and I’m in the middle of reading one. It’s so good. He’s so smart, and he’s really passionate about the history here, and very involved in the historian-like circles. Those two are really involved, and I would say do this for more than just the money, because that is something I feel like it’s tough to come across.”
Also cited by Mr. Ciraldo as among the best in preserving and highlighting the community’s history is Kelley Schild.
“She [Ms. Schild] is the president of The Villagers,” he said, “and that is Miami-Dade’s oldest volunteer organization that focuses on historic preservation. Considering that they’re all volunteers, I believe they do tremendous work. This includes providing grants that directly support historic preservation projects all around South Florida.”
Ms. Schild is from Miami. She began her involvement with The Villagers due to her passion and interest in historic preservation.
“I knew about all the great grants that The Villagers do and their support of all the historic sites in Miami,” she said. “I wanted to do something after I retired from work. I wanted to do something to be a part of that and be a part of saving Miami’s history.”
The Villagers was started in 1966, said Ms. Schild, when a group of concerned citizens gathered to save “one of the entrances of Coral Gables, the Douglas entrance. At that time, it was going to be demolished for a grocery store and a parking lot. A group got together and eventually purchased the entrance individually, as a group, and then from that, some of the ladies, the wives of the men that purchased it, got together and formed The Villagers to help save other historic sites.”
Every year, she said, The Villagers raise money. “We have house tours and garden tours, and all the money we raise, we then give as grants to local historic sites for anything they need to help preserve their sites.”
Ms. Schild said one thing that motivates her is seeing the impact they have had on different sites.
“Every month,” she said, “The Villagers has our monthly meetings at different historic sites throughout Miami-Dade County, and so we get to see firsthand the fruits of our labor, where the grants have gone to help preserve these sites, and also getting new applicants for the grants. Every year, it seems like a new group finds out about the grant process, and it just keeps growing every single year. There is not a historic site in Miami-Dade County that hasn’t received a Villager grant over the last almost 60 years. That’s exciting to know that we’re putting our money where our mouth is, and we’re also making a difference.”
Ms. Schild also cited the Miami Design Preservation League, the Dade Heritage Trust and Black Police Precinct for their abilities.
Mr. Cirlado also pointed to actor and producer Derek Hedlund for his impact onpreserving and highlighting the community’s history.
“People say that Miami is shortsighted sometimes when it comes to historic preservation,” said Ms. Schild, “because there’s always new development and people looking towards the future, but I think there’s a lot of groups in Miami that are equally interested in preserving the past and saving historic places and also highlighting that and educating people at the same time how it’s important to pass on the stories of our lives and the story of the beginnings of Miami.”
