Underwater sculpture park brings coral reef art to Miami Beach

South Florida is seeing a wave of new cars, but they won't add to traffic or lengthen anyone's commute. That's because the cars are made of marine-grade concrete and were installed underwater.

Over several days late last month, crews lowered 22 life-sized cars into the ocean, several hundred feet off South Beach. The project was organised by a group that pioneers underwater sculpture parks as a way to create human-made coral reefs.

“Concrete Coral,” commissioned by the nonprofit REEFLINE, will soon be seeded with 2,200 native corals that have been grown in a nearby Miami lab. The project is partially funded by a $5 million bond from the city of Miami Beach.

The group is also trying to raise $40 million to extend the potentially 11-phase project along an underwater corridor just off the city's 11-kilometre coastline.

“I think we are making history here,” Ximena Caminos, the group's founder, said. “It's one of a kind, it's a pioneering, underwater reef that's teaming up with science, teaming up with art.”

She conceived the overall plan with architect Shohei Shigematsu, and the artist Leandro Erlich designed the car sculptures for the first phase.

Colin Foord, who runs REEFLINE's Miami coral lab, said they'll soon start the planting process and create a forest of soft corals over the car sculptures, which will serve as a habitat swarming with marine life.

“I think it really lends to the depth of the artistic message itself of having a traffic jam of cars underwater,” Foord said. “So nature's gonna take back over, and we're helping by growing the soft corals.”

Foord said he's confident the native gorgonian corals will thrive because they were grown from survivors of the 2023 bleaching event, where a marine heatwave killed massive amounts of Florida corals.

Plans for future deployments include Petroc Sesti's “Heart of Okeanos,” modelled after a giant blue whale heart, and Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre's “The Miami Reef Star, a group of starfish shapes arranged in a larger star pattern.

“What that's going to do is accelerate the formation of a coral reef ecosystem,” Foord said. “It's going to attract a lot more life and add biodiversity and really kind of push the envelope of artificial reef-building here in Florida.”

Besides being a testing ground for new coral transplantation and hybrid reef design and development, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner expects the project to generate local jobs with ecotourism experiences like snorkeling, diving, kayaking and paddleboard tours.

The reefs will be located about 20 feet below the surface of the water and about 800 feet from the shore.

“Miami Beach is a global model for so many different issues, and now we're doing it for REEFLINE,” Meiner said during a beachside ceremony last month. “I'm so proud to be working together with the private market to make sure that this continues right here in Miami Beach to be the blueprint for other cities to utilize.”

The nonprofit also offers community education programmes, where volunteers can plant corals alongside scientists, and a floating marine learning centre, where participants can gain first-hand experience in coral conservation every month.

Caminos, the group's founder, acknowledges that the installation won't fix all of the problems — which are as big as climate change and sea level rise — but she said it can serve as a catalyst for dialogue about the value of coastal ecosystems.

“We can show how creatively, collaboratively and inter-disciplinarily we can all tackle a man-made problem with man-made solutions,” Caminos said.