Concrete Cars Become a Living Coral Reef Off Miami

Twenty-two cars now rest on the seafloor off Miami Beach. They are life-size, cast in marine-grade concrete, and anchored against the current. Soon they will start to disappear.

Not from erosion, but from life. Coral is meant to grow over them until the shapes of the cars dissolve into reef.

A submerged vehicle tire covered in marine growth with a yellow and black striped fish swimming nearby.

The piece is called Concrete Coral, and it comes from conceptual artist Leandro Erlich. It was unveiled during Miami Art Week, and it marks the opening of something much larger: the ReefLine, a planned seven-mile underwater sculpture park that treats art and coral restoration as the same project.

This is not a sunken-junk reef. Every car is cast from pH-neutral concrete, a material chosen specifically to invite coral to attach and thrive. That detail matters. The point here is ecological recovery, not spectacle.

Concrete cars cast in marine-grade concrete resting on the seafloor as part of the ReefLine underwater sculpture park off Miami Beach Photo: Christopher Uriarte

Art designed to be overtaken by nature

ReefLine was founded by Argentinian curator Ximena Caminos, in partnership with architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA. Its mission is direct. Florida’s reefs are under severe climate stress, and the project is built to help rebuild them.

So Concrete Coral works as habitat first and sculpture second. The cars are engineered to survive hurricane-force waves. Their hoods carry a system called Coral Lok, developed by ReefLine’s Miami Native Coral Lab, which fixes coral fragments in place fast and with as little stress to the coral as possible. As those fragments take hold, dense stands of soft octocorals should spread across the metal-shaped concrete. The outlines of the cars will slowly vanish into something alive.

An underwater scene featuring a submerged car covered in sand, with two fish swimming near it.

Underwater scene with submerged cars covered in sand and a fish swimming by.

Why cars

The subject was not chosen at random. On land, the car is one of our great engines of pollution. A single passenger vehicle puts out roughly 4.6 metric tons of CO2 every year, and more than 156 million people in the United States breathe air the American Lung Association considers unhealthy.

Underwater, that same object flips. The car stops being a symbol of extraction and becomes scaffolding for regrowth.

Erlich frames it simply. The cars, he says, were once <q>carriers of pollution and speed</q>, and now become vessels of regeneration. Colin Foord, ReefLine’s director of science, describes the eventual effect as a forest overtaking a traffic jam. Nature reclaiming a human artifact, in real time.

Underwater view of a concrete car sculpture engineered to host coral growth in the ReefLine park Photo: Brittany Weber

Only the first chapter

Concrete Coral opens the ReefLine, but the park is meant to keep growing. Two more installations are scheduled for 2026. The Miami Reef Star, by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, is a field of 46 3D-printed stars inspired by starfish migration. Heart of Okeanos, by Petroc Sesti, is a sculpture modeled on the heart of a blue whale.

What ties them together is a quiet, radical idea: art as infrastructure. These are objects designed to age, to erode, and to become more useful over time, not less. They are built to be improved by the ocean rather than preserved against it.

Seen that way, the submerged cars are not a gimmick. They are a prompt. A pointer away from a carbon-heavy past and toward something slower and restorative.

A concrete car sculpture beginning its life as artificial reef habitat off the Miami coastline Photo: Nola Schoder