Meet ‘Survivor’ Winner Dee Valladares

In mind and body, Dee Valladares was fully in Fiji, focused for 26 days on the mental and physical challenges of Survivor Season 45. But her heart never left the city she loves.

“Every time I’d wake up, I’d think, ‘What are my friends doing? What is my family doing?’” says the 27-year-old Miamian, whose speaking speed reaches a Salsa-like 250 beats per minute when she rattles off a list of what she loves about her city. (Some favorites? The people! The food! The positive energy! The diversity! The coffee shops! The Salsa dancing! The huge fitness community!) “Oh my God, everything,” she says.

“I think you need to have something to miss,” Vallardes says. “That’s what [got me] through—thinking about getting back home and telling them I’d won.”

Homesickness worked in her favor. In December 2023, as millions watched the three-hour finale, Vallardes proved she could fulfill the Survivor imperative to “outwit, outplay, and outlast” her competition and be crowned the season’s “Sole Survivor.”

The Havana-born, Hialeah-raised entrepreneur—the first Cuban native to appear on the show and the first Miamian to win it—came late to the Survivor phenomenon. In 2020, a friend told her about the series, saying she thought Vallardes would enjoy watching it. But after viewing one episode, Vallardes—a CrossFit, hiking, and water sports enthusiast—had a different take. “I said, ‘I think I’d be good on the show,’” she recalls. In December 2022, Vallardes submitted a three-minute audition video to producers. In the spring of 2023, she joined 17 other castaways on Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands.

Miami proved a valuable training ground for the Mamanucas. For one thing, “I was really used to that heat and humidity,” says Vallardes. But more than that, Miami’s diversity made it easy to connect with people from many backgrounds, she says. Her own background (she studied psychology at FIU and later worked in pharmaceutical sales before co-founding backpack company Wanaroam ) gave her an added peek into the workings of the human psyche, and probably a master course in tenacity and persuasiveness.

“I relied on relationships,” she says of her strategy on the island. “I went in saying I wanted to build alliances that would outlast the game. I didn’t go in there all cutthroat or blood-hungry. If you take care of people, you can go far. Take care of your people, and they take care of you.”

But taking care of people 8,000 miles away proved to be the ultimate motivation. She’ll use some of the $1 million prize money she won to help her parents, who came to the United States with Vallardes and her brother when she was 2 years old. “Every immigrant knows what it’s like to see your parents struggle and sacrifice,” says Vallardes, who reminded herself during filming that every hardship she was enduring paled in comparison to her parents’ real lives in their early years. “To be able to give back to them is unbelievable. I’m so grateful,” she says.

Gratitude is a recurring theme in conversations with Vallardes. And for her, that sentiment also embodies the spirit of Miami—and the people who call it home. “It’s a city you can succeed in,” she says, her tempo picking up again. “You feel that. There’s a lot of appreciative people here.”

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