Saint Augustine: The Oldest European-Founded City

Saint Augustine was founded by the Spanish in fifteen sixty-five, making it the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States. It is fifty-five years older than Plymouth, forty-two years older than Jamestown. The Spanish founded it partly as a port and partly as a base for resisting French Huguenot settlements in the region, a competition between European colonial powers that the local Timucua people had no stake in and no say about.

The Castillo de San Marcos, the stone fort at the edge of Matanzas Bay, was built by the Spanish between sixteen seventy-two and seventeen ninety-five. It has never fallen to military attack. The British took it once, in seventeen sixty-three, but through treaty rather than assault.

It is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States and is now a National Monument. The city's layout is still largely the colonial Spanish grid. The narrow streets of the historic district, lined with buildings from the Spanish and later British periods, have survived because Saint Augustine was too economically marginal in the nineteenth century to tear them down and build something new.

That pattern of preservation through poverty is a common thread in American historic preservation. Saint Augustine's streets were the site of civil rights demonstrations in nineteen sixty-three and nineteen sixty-four, as part of the broader movement. Martin Luther King Jr.

was arrested here. The demonstrations here contributed to the timeline of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four. The old city is real and it is worth the exit.