St. Johns County and Saint Augustine: The Oldest City

Saint Augustine is the seat of Saint Johns County, and Saint Johns County is one of Florida's two original counties, carved out when the United States took possession of Florida from Spain in eighteen twenty-one. But the city itself is far older than the county, older than the United States, older than the English colonies that became the United States.

Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a Spanish admiral and the first governor of Florida, founded Saint Augustine on September eighth, fifteen sixty-five. He had been sent specifically to dislodge a French Huguenot colony that had established itself at Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, and to claim Florida permanently for Spain. His fleet arrived at this harbor on Saint Augustine's feast day, and the name followed naturally. The settlement he planted that September has been continuously occupied ever since, making it the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement on the continental United States, more than forty years older than Jamestown.

The Castillo de San Marcos, the massive coquina stone fortress that still dominates the waterfront today, was constructed between sixteen seventy-two and sixteen ninety-five. Coquina, a local shellstone, was chosen because cannonballs tended to embed themselves in it rather than shatter it. The strategy worked: the Castillo was besieged multiple times over its history and never taken by force.

For two hundred fifty years, Saint Augustine changed flags repeatedly, passing between Spain, Britain, and the United States, carrying the accumulated layers of colonial history right to the edge of the modern beach resort that surrounds it now.