Coral Gables Built Four Dog Parks in Three Years. The Fifth One Is Stuck in Court.

On a Saturday morning at Ponce de Leon Boulevard and LeJeune Road, the newest patch of ground in Coral Gables built for off-leash dogs is already busy before nine. Cooling turf, hydration stations, a rotation of small dogs and large dogs working around each other under the Metrorail line. Two miles north, on a quiet stretch of University Drive across from the Coral Gables Branch Library, a different patch of city-owned ground sits behind orange construction fencing, the subject of a lawsuit that has been working through Miami-Dade Circuit Court since February.

Both plots are part of the same story. Coral Gables went from having essentially nowhere for a dog to run leash-free to having four distinct off-leash locations in about three years, a real shift for a city that spent decades sending dog owners to Chapman Field Park outside its borders for that kind of space. The story most residents have heard is about the fight over the fifth site. The story worth knowing is that the city already built something bigger than what's being fought over, and it opened eight months ago without a single lawsuit.

The map as it actually stands

If you own a dog in Coral Gables today, here is where you can already let it off the leash, no petition or courtroom required.

Add Catalonia Park, which has allowed occasional off-leash use amid its own history of neighborhood disagreement, and you have five spots where a Coral Gables dog has spent time running free at some point in the last three years. Three of them opened quietly in 2023. The fourth, and by far the largest, opened this January with a level of fanfare the earlier three never got.

What actually opened this year

Chewy Bark Park is the one to know about if you haven't already found it. It sits inside Phase 3 of the Underline, the project converting the land beneath the Metrorail into a chain of public parks running from Brickell down toward South Miami, and it's a partnership between the city and the pet retailer Chewy, whose headquarters roots trace back to South Florida. The opening drew more than 500 pet owners, according to Coral Gables Magazine, with pop-up treats from Woof Gang Bakery and Playa Bowls and a pet CPR demonstration from the Coral Gables Fire Department.

At 17,000 square feet, it's roughly the size of a football field's end zone stretched out twice over, built specifically to solve the problem that older, smaller fenced areas couldn't: enough separation between big and small dogs, enough shade and cooling turf to make a Miami afternoon tolerable, enough room that a Saturday crowd doesn't turn into a scrum. It's also the easiest of the five sites to get to from most of central Coral Gables, sitting right on Ponce de Leon Boulevard.

What it didn't get was neighborhood opposition. That's not incidental to the story. It's the whole reason the University Drive fight looks the way it does.

The corner still behind fencing

The 40,000-square-foot parcel at 520 University Drive has been city property since a 1972 zoning action that designated it for overflow parking, according to the Coral Gables Gazette's reporting on the dispute. Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson, who also championed the Salvadore Park dog run, began pushing to convert it into a neighborhood-scale off-leash park after hearing from residents who wanted something closer than the existing options for people living between Bird Road and Coral Way.

The proposal had real support. A petition backing the park collected more than 225 signatures, and the November 18, 2025 commission meeting where it came up for a vote drew a standing-room crowd that Mayor Vince Lago said was the largest turnout in favor of a single item he'd seen in thirteen years in public service. The commission approved it 3-0.

Then came January. At the January 13, 2026 meeting, the chamber filled again, this time with residents who live near the proposed site objecting to barking, traffic, and parking pressure on a residential street. Resident Sara Cortes told the Miami Herald she wasn't against dog parks in general, just this location. Commissioner Melissa Castro, who runs a monthly dog walk of her own along Miracle Mile, had heard from upset neighbors almost immediately after the November vote and raised concerns at the meeting. The commission declined to reverse course.

By February, the disagreement had moved into court. Resident Jose Val Cohen and a group calling itself the University Green Neighbors Association filed suit, arguing that the city needed to approve the project through a formal ordinance, with the mailed notice and advertised hearings that process requires under Florida's municipal government statutes, rather than the simpler resolution the commission actually used. Part of their argument rests on that 1972 designation: if the parcel's approved use as overflow parking ends, they contend, it should revert to single-family residential zoning rather than convert to a park use by administrative vote.

The city filed a motion to dismiss on April 1, 2026, arguing the resolution imposed no new regulation on anyone and pointing to a 2024 case where a similar Miami Beach measure was upheld as a resolution because of its limited, administrative character. As of this writing, the fencing is still up, the design review period the city opened earlier in the year has come and gone, and the case has not been resolved.

Same city, two different outcomes

Line up the two projects and the pattern is plain. The Underline site sits under Metrorail track, buffered from any home's backyard, so its approval never touched the more sensitive legal ground that triggers Florida's stricter notice requirements. The University Drive parcel sits directly across from single-family homes on a residential street, which is exactly the kind of use change that state law wants residents formally notified about before a vote, not after.

This isn't really a story about whether Coral Gables wants more off-leash space. The 225-signature petition and the standing-room crowd in November both say residents do. It's a story about where in a small, densely built, historic city you can put that space without running into the property line of someone's front yard, and how much process the law demands once you do. The Gables has more than 70 parks scattered across its grid, but very few open patches of city land that don't back up against a house.

Where to actually go this weekend

Until the University Drive question resolves, the practical answer for Coral Gables dog owners hasn't changed much since January. Chewy Bark Park at Ponce and LeJeune is the newest, largest, and easiest to reach from most of the city, and mornings tend to be its busiest and coolest window. Salvadore Park's dog run on Andalusia Avenue pairs off-leash time with the rest of the park's tennis courts and playground, useful if you're bringing kids along with the dog. The smaller fenced areas at 1505 Ponce and Villa Valencia are worth knowing if you're closer to those pockets of the city and don't need the space Chewy Bark Park offers.

None of this requires a car ride to Chapman Field Park anymore, which was the only real off-leash option for Gables residents as recently as a few years ago. That's the part of the story that gets lost in the noise around one contested corner. The map already changed. It just changed somewhere other than where everyone's been arguing.

Coral Gables keeps adding small, specific details to its daily life this way, a park here, a courtyard market there, a legal fight over forty thousand square feet of parking lot two blocks from the library. Keeping track of it is part of what makes the city worth paying attention to block by block. If you're curious about what else is shifting in the neighborhood, from its historic districts to its newest public spaces, Jane Gomez Mena and Laura Mullaney at Historic Homes Miami keep close watch on both.