The Founding of the Oldest City

On the twenty-eighth of August, fifteen sixty-five, a Spanish fleet under Pedro Menendez de Aviles sighted the Florida coast. That day was the feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and so the admiral gave the saint's name to the settlement he was about to plant. Eleven days later, on the eighth of September, Menendez came ashore at a Timucua village called Seloy, where his chaplain, Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, celebrated a Mass of thanksgiving.

That ceremony marks the founding of San Agustin, Saint Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States. It predates the English colony at Jamestown by forty-two years and the Pilgrims at Plymouth by fifty-five. Menendez had sailed from Spain under a contract signed by King Philip the Second.

His orders were blunt: explore the coast, and drive out any intruders who were not subjects of the Spanish crown. The intruders were French Protestants, called Huguenots, who had built Fort Caroline near the mouth of the Saint Johns River, dangerously close to the sea lane Spain's treasure fleets used on their way home. To Spain, a Protestant fort on that route was both a heresy and a knife at the throat of empire.

The people already living here were the Timucua. Their town of Seloy stood on this waterfront, in a region the Timucua had long called home. Chief Seloy allowed the newcomers to fortify his council house, and the Spanish established the mission of Nombre de Dios, the Name of God, often considered the first Catholic mission in what became the United States.

Relations soured within months, and before long Menendez moved parts of his colony to firmer ground. Saint Augustine would be burned, besieged, and traded between empires again and again over the centuries to come, yet people never stopped living here. Four flags, some say five, have flown over its plaza.

But it all begins on this shore, with a hard, devout, and ruthless admiral, a Timucua chief who opened his town, and a Mass said under the Florida sun more than four and a half centuries ago.