The old Spanish town of St. Augustine was truly a revelation. It was my brother Roger who, having visited the city earlier, suggested that we include it on our itinerary, and I was grateful for his advice after we had surveyed the attractions it offered. Established as the oldest town in America by the Spaniard explorers in 1565, Pedro Menendez de Aviles is credited for putting the town on the map, having named it for the saint upon whose feast day his ship landed ashore. Over the centuries, it has attracted a vast number of settlers eager to find their fortunes in the New World. For the contemporary traveler, the city offers a wealth of reminders of what colonial American looked like under Spanish influence.

We began our exploration the way we usually do—at the Visitors Center. From there, armed with maps and recommendations for restaurants, we walked to the historic district, passing through the old City Gates (left) wrought in giant stone masonry and sporting huge cannonballs on their pedestals. Right past the gates, the town opens up to the famous St. George Street where the bulk of the action is located. Lined with souvenir shops, restaurants, ice-cream parlors and amusement arcades, the street retains its delightful Spanish ambience in the distinctive architecture that characterizes all small Mediterranean towns.

Having seen this architecture in some old pockets of Bombay quite frequently through the Portuguese settlers, I was charmed to note how similar in style and conception these communities were. St. George Street (right)  is also the location of the oldest wooden school house in the country where tours of the interior are offered. Deciding to eat brunch, we made our way to Aviles Street, past the Plaza de la Constitution, a green oasis that forms the Basilica-Cathedral Square. At Las Haciencas Restaurant, we ate gigantic Spanish omelettes, then resumed our walking tour of the town.

St. Augustine is extremely walker-friendly and there is nothing that cannot be reached on foot. After a visit to the spectacular interior of the Cathedral with its magnificent marble altar, we left the ancient Spanish Quarter behind us, and walked down King Street where the ambience changed dramatically.

This was more modern, sophisticated St. Augustine—the St. Augustine of Henry Flagler who has a college named after him. Indeed, the old Ponce de Leon Hotel that he designed and created with an eye to attracting wealthy Americans to the sunny South, has been turned today into a superb institution of higher learning. The splendor of the building called Flagler College has to be seen to be believed. Not only is the exterior stunning, but the main lobby (today the Visitors Lobby) is a study in gilded Renaissance Baroque excess. We walked around the grand building, then crossed King Street to get to the Lightner Museum, also one of Flagler’s former hotels, then called the Alcazar.

Today, the Lightner houses the individual collection of Chicago publisher Otto C. Lightner who spent his lifetime amassing decorative Victorian artifacts from clocks and marble fountains to carved wooden tables and Tiffany stained glass windows. The gardens that surround the building are equally compelling for the avid visitor and the koi that swam under the Japanese bridges were fascinating. The outsides of Flagler’s former hotels, all in the Hispano-Moorish style, are truly breathtaking. This drama is seen also in the Cordoba Hotel, Flagler’s third, which stands adjacent to the Lightner—together they make a stylish architectural statement and give St. Augustine an august grandeur.
Castillo de San Marco:

Our next stop was at the Castillo de San Marco which lies across the broad Avenida Menendez. The bridge across the river is flanked by twin lions but the fortress sits on the seafront, occupying a position of strategic beauty. The Spanish colonizers began work on this stone fortification in 1672. Successive settlers in the region added to its dimensions so that it is a hulking structure today but deeply aesthetic in the star shape that its bastions have taken. Built uniquely of coquina, a combination of powdered compressed seashell and coral with mortar, the structure’s walls remain delicate and subject to easy destruction. After the US gained control of Florida from the Spaniards in 1821, the fortress was renamed Fort Marion and used during the Civil War as a military prison, hospital and storage depot. Today maintained by the US Park Service, self-guided tours costing $6 each take visitors through the antiquated environs, allowing visits to the old infirmary, the soldiers’ barracks, the chapel, etc. Though much of the fortress has fallen into disuse, effective reconstruction is slowly bringing it back to its former glory. We were fortunate enough to see a re-enactment of a canon-firing ceremony on the gun deck undertaken as if at Fort Marion in the days of the Civil War. Confederate soldiers dressed in the blue coats of that period performed the ceremony on the ramparts of the fort under perfectly blue skies that were mirrored in the perfectly blue waters of the ocean. It was easy to imagine how effectively those canons might have delivered their deadly ammunition to their unfortunate targets. Later in our rambles around the moat, the watch towers and the guard rooms, we had a chance to escape into a former century and imagine what life might have looked like when lived in an age of siege.

(Llew stands outside the oldest wooden schoolhouse in the USA and Rochelle stands outsdie the oldest house in the USA)

St. Augustine truly offers a glimpse of the kind of Florida one does not see anywhere else in the state. It is a tribute to the pioneering zeal, if destructive spirit, of the greedy Spanish colonists who arrived in the New World for god, gold and glory but left behind a living legacy of their national culture. Glad to have experienced this spirit for ourselves, we spent a night further south in Titusville before heading off the next day to Palm Beach.

Bon Voyage!