Over centuries the city changed hands between Spain, Britain, and the United States, each leaving its mark on the architecture, the street grid, and the place names. By the late nineteenth century, Henry Flagler's railroad brought northern winter visitors by the trainload, and the old garrison town picked up Spanish Renaissance hotels, a Mediterranean Revival bridge, and the look of a resort. The Castillo became a national monument in 1924. In 1965, on its four-hundredth anniversary, St. Augustine paused to take stock of how much had survived intact — the fort, the street grid, the Cathedral, the lanes — and the modern preservation era began. Today the old quarter is a national historic landmark and a year-round destination, anchored by the Castillo, the lighthouse on Anastasia, and the Bridge of Lions.
The nation's oldest city — four and a half centuries of stone, light, and survival. St. Augustine, Florida sits on the Atlantic barrier-island coast, on the western shore of Matanzas Bay. On September 8, 1565, the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore with several hundred settlers and named the new town for the saint on whose feast day they had arrived — forty-two years before the English reached Jamestown and fifty-five before the Pilgrims touched Plymouth Rock. It is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental United States, and it has never stopped being a town. Every winter, from November into January, the Nights of Lights drapes the whole old quarter in white light until the four-hundred-year-old streets glow.
Why People Visit St Augustine Florida
St. Augustine brings four and a half centuries of American history into one compact, walkable city. Visitors come for the coquina fort that was never taken, the oldest streets in the country, Flagler's Gilded-Age architecture, the lighthouse and the bayfront, and the winter glow of the Nights of Lights. It is historic, scenic, and unmistakably first. The road of American history runs back further here than anywhere else in the continental United States.
