For more than a decade, the Deering Seafood Festival has brought people from all over South Florida together for a day of delicious cuisine and fun entertainment at the beautiful Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay.
Residents and visitors can leave their worries and differences at the estate’s entryway to (among many other activities) eat great seafood, watch fantastic music performances, peruse tents hosting local artists and vendors, take pontoon boat rides, interact with environmental education exhibits and see live demonstrations by some of Miami’s greatest chefs while Junkanoo musicians and stilt walkers parade through the crowd.
Looking over the ocean of attendees soaking up the sun and breathing the fresh breeze floating over Biscayne Bay, you will see people from all walks of life come together to enjoy one of South Florida’s most inclusive gatherings.
It is one of the most — if not the most — culturally diverse annual events in Miami-Dade County. Each March, thousands of people of all ages, ethnicities and financial standings congregate at the 444-acre Miami-Dade County park for eight hours to eat, play and revel in Miami’s unparalleled weather at one of its most gorgeous historic locales.
The Deering Seafood Festival, which turned 13 on March, is a celebration of our converging interests and a magnet for those of us who love South Florida and everything that makes it a special place to live. Through it, we’re reminded that despite our differences — which neighborhoods we live in, what kind of cars we drive, our political affiliations — we’re not so different after all.
It is no wonder the event has steadily grown in popularity while continuing to improve. The numbers don’t lie. This year, the festival broke attendance records to the extent that its organizers had to stop admitting people to avoid overcrowding.
In anticipation of this, some savvy residents planned ahead, arrived early and camped out in front of the park up to three hours before the Deering Estate opened its gates to the public — not unlike what you’d see outside of an Apple store after a new iPhone is released. Except, instead of an electronic wonder in your pocket, you are getting a potentially unforgettable experience in one of the most stunning locales in the state.
If there were morose people there, I didn’t see them. Rather, I saw countless casually dressed eventgoers enjoy the experience and the company of complete strangers — a rare sight in our typically hurried daily lives, but a common one when we finally let our guards down.
The best part of going, however, may be knowing that your entry fee has helped fund the Deering Estate Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Deering Estate that does invaluable work supporting education, research, cultural arts, environmental conservation and historic preservation. Every year, more than 17,000 kids benefit from its many resources and programs.
So, you are not only getting a pleasant and memorable waterside experience from the price of a ticket, you are helping to educate and reinforce in the future stewards of our planet the love for our surroundings that originally brought us out to the festival.
That is what I would call a win-win.
