Tequesta, Florida: Named for the People Who Were Here First

The village of Tequesta in northern Palm Beach County takes its name from the Tequesta people, the original inhabitants of the southeastern tip of Florida who lived along Biscayne Bay and the lower Atlantic coast for centuries before European contact. Spanish explorers encountered the Tequesta in the fifteen hundreds and established a short-lived Jesuit mission among them in fifteen sixty-seven. The Tequesta were a fishing and gathering people, not agriculturalists, and they traded along a coastline they knew intimately.

By the early seventeen hundreds, disease, Spanish colonial disruption, and warfare had reduced the Tequesta to a remnant population. The modern village of Tequesta was incorporated in nineteen fifty-seven as a quiet residential community at the mouth of the Loxahatchee River, where Jupiter Inlet meets the Atlantic. The name, at least, preserves the memory of the people who shaped this coast long before any town was platted here.