The Tequesta and the Miami Circle
Near Miami, Florida
Long before Julia Tuttle, before any railroad or road, the mouth of the Miami River belonged to the Tequesta. For centuries these Native people fished the bay and lived in a village on the riverbank. When the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon reached Biscayne Bay in fifteen thirteen, he recorded a name that sounded like Chequesta.
In fifteen sixty seven the Spanish built a small mission here, with soldiers and a Jesuit brother named Francisco Villareal who had learned the Tequesta language. The mission failed within a few years, and by seventeen sixty three, when Spain handed Florida to Britain, the last surviving Tequesta sailed away to Cuba. Their story might have vanished entirely, except that in the summer of nineteen ninety eight, workers demolishing an old apartment building at Four Zero One Brickell Avenue exposed something astonishing carved into the limestone bedrock.
It was a perfect circle, about thirty eight feet across, formed by dozens of holes and basins cut into solid rock. Archaeologists believe the Miami Circle is roughly eighteen hundred to two thousand years old, almost certainly built by the Tequesta, perhaps the foundation of a ceremonial structure. Rather than let a luxury condominium tower rise over it, the State of Florida bought the site for more than twenty six million dollars, and today it is a National Historic Landmark hidden in the heart of downtown.
