Florida Guide Florida regions, islands, and historic-city planning

The oldest city

St. Augustine, the oldest city, and Spanish Florida

The United States' oldest continuously occupied European-founded city is not in New England or Virginia but on Florida's northeast coast. Spain founded St. Augustine in 1565, decades before Jamestown or Plymouth, and held Florida for most of two centuries. That deep Spanish colonial layer - forts, missions, and a Latin foundation - is where Florida's story begins.

Last checked July 12, 2026

1565 and the founding of St. Augustine

In 1565 the Spanish admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles established St. Augustine to defend Spain's treasure fleets and to drive out a French colony to the north. It became the capital of Spanish Florida and the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the continental United States - a full generation before the English settled Jamestown in 1607.

The city's survival was never guaranteed. It was burned by the English privateer Francis Drake in 1586 and repeatedly attacked, which eventually pushed Spain to build a permanent stone fortress rather than rely on wooden stockades.

Coquina walls and the Castillo

Between 1672 and 1695 the Spanish built the Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, from coquina - a soft local limestone of compressed shell that absorbed cannon fire rather than shattering. The fort never fell to assault and anchors the historic district on Matanzas Bay to this day.

St. Augustine changed hands as empires traded Florida: Spain ceded it to Britain in 1763, regained it in 1783, and finally transferred Florida to the United States in 1821. Each era left its mark on the narrow streets, but the Spanish colonial core remains the city's identity.

A Latin and mission frontier

Spanish Florida was more than one town. A chain of Catholic missions once stretched across the north of the peninsula, and Pensacola on the Gulf coast was another early Spanish outpost. This makes Florida's European history older and more Hispanic than the familiar Anglo-Atlantic story of the original thirteen colonies.

That Latin foundation echoes forward across the state - in the Cuban and Spanish culture of Ybor City and Miami centuries later - making St. Augustine not just an old town but the first chapter of a peninsula shaped again and again by the Caribbean and the Atlantic world.

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