St. Augustine's history began with exploration 42 years before the English colonized Jamestown and 55 years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Ponce de Leon hoped the Indian Spring he discovered was his Fountain of Youth. Today you can explore the excavations of the original colony.
This is a community that takes pride in its past. In the late 1950s, an ongoing effort to preserve and restore many historical structures began. Its "living history" includes remains and structures from each of the centuries including a seventeenth-century fortress and eighteenth-century buildings. Sprawling giant architectural structures from the nineteenth-century, when Henry Flagler launched the "Gilded Age" of hotels and railroads, still stand in wonderful splendor.
