Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Virginia Gardens, FL

Virginia Gardens is a village in Miami-Dade County, wedged against Miami International Airport, and part of the Miami metropolitan area.

Virginia Gardens exists because of horses — in 1947, neighboring Miami Springs passed an ordinance outlawing horses within its city limits, so about 50 residents, many of them horse-farm operators, broke away and incorporated their own village on July 10, 1947.

The village is named for Virginia, the home state of many of its wealthy founding residents.

At incorporation, many Virginia Gardens residents kept large estates of up to five acres suited to horse ownership; today only a single one-acre residential property remains, and most lots are the roughly 0.2-acre parcels of a typical suburb.

Virginia Gardens is one of Miami-Dade's smallest municipalities, covering only about 0.3 square miles of land.

The village's population has barely changed in decades — the 2010 census counted 2,375 residents in 808 households, and the 2020 census counted 2,364 residents.

In the 1960s, the Miami-Dade Port Authority took some 450 acres in the Virginia Gardens area to make room for the growing Miami International Airport.

As of the 2000 census, Virginia Gardens had the nineteenth-highest percentage of Cuban residents of any community in the United States, at 26.11% of the population.

Virginia Gardens' children attend Miami-Dade County Public Schools, and the village remains a fully built-out, almost entirely single-family residential enclave.