America's Oldest City — St. Augustine has been continuously inhabited since 1565 (55 years before the Mayflower), the Castillo de San Marcos fortress is the oldest masonry fort in the continental US, and the Spanish colonial quarter's cobblestone streets are unlike anywhere else in America
St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States — founded by Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on September 8, 1565, 42 years before Jamestown and 55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Castillo de San Marcos (begun 1672) is the oldest masonry fortification in the continental US, built from coquina — a soft limestone of compressed shells unique to northeast Florida. The St. George Street pedestrian quarter has architecture ranging from 16th-century Spanish to British colonial (1763–1783) to American Ter…
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine as a Spanish military base to drive out French Huguenot settlers from Fort Caroline — the French had arrived just weeks earlier. St. Augustine served as the capital of Spanish Florida for 236 years (1565–1763, then 1783–1821), making it the longest-serving colonial capital in US history. Britain held the city 1763–1783 (it remained loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution). Spain ceded Florida to the US in 1821. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. led wade-ins at the then-segregated beaches here as part of the campaign that contributed to th…