Friday, November 6, 2014
We visited St. Augustine over two days, Wednesday the 4th and today. As you probably know, St. Augustine is the oldest city in the US as Don Juan Ponce de Leon landed here from Spain in 1513. He was exploring trade routes from Mexico and Cuba and searching for gold and a spring with magical powers. He found no gold, but did find the Fountain of Youth. The spring was a fresh water supply for provisioning the ships. He also found the nearby gulf stream that would aid Spain’s fleet.
Spain attempted to settle here several times but failed, however in 1564 the French did set up a fort and colony. Spain recognized this would be a problem for their commercial fleet so they sent a military guy, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles here in 1565. He killed off all the French and took over the colony and fort. He renamed the town St. Augustine, predating Jamestown and Plymouth Rock by several decades.
The history gets a little crazy here with the British coming in and Spanish getting it back, There were 8 flags over St. Augustine over the years, but the Spanish influence here remains strong. We are drawn here by the history and the buildings.
Our first stop is the Fountain of Youth. Here we are trying a little of the magic water. Do we look any younger?
Hmm…. maybe you have to drink lots of it. It seems we should have had something more ceremonial than paper cups.
Our next stop is the fort, Castillo de San Marcos. Yes I know, we said no more forts. This one had a couple of things going for it; first was the historic weapons demonstration scheduled for today and it is constructed of coquina.
Coquina is unique to this area, it is calcite that is loaded with old seashells. The stuff is quarried out in blocks. It was originally formed from an ancient seabed that covered the area 10,000s years ago. Coquina has some unique features, it is a relatively soft stone, so cannon balls just stick in it rather that splintering the stone. The walls are 10 feet thick in some places making it impenetrable. Although the outer walls of this fort are covered in tabby (like stucco) and white washed, other Coquina walls have a surface that is really nasty with knife sharp edges due to the shells in it. The Spanish would often coat coquina walls with a poison that would kill would be attackers.
The antique weapons demo was a cannon. We were hoping for pistols or long guns instead, but JQ Public likes to hear cannons. These guys re-enacted the drill of loading and firing, so it was interesting.
The fort, designed and built by the Spanish from 1672 to 1695, is shaped to place attackers in a crossfire from any two bastions. In addition there is a dry moat surrounding the fort, creating an effective kill zone for would be attackers. This fort was never surrendered under battle.
A walk across the street brings you to the entry to St. Augustine, the City Gates. Back in the 1600-1700s the city was walled off with a sentry at the gate. There was no entry after dark.
The main street through the historic area, which extends from this gate, is St. George. This is the street that has all the old historic buildings. Unfortunately they have really commercialized it with shops in most of the historic buildings. Kinda cheesy, in our opinion.
Lets skip ahead to the 1910 era. Remember Henry Flagler? He loved this place, so he built a really big hotel called the Ponce de Leon, now used as Flagler College.
It was built for the vacationing millionaire. Price to stay was in the $1000/night range, but you had to pay for 3 months worth, up front. The next picture was the lobby, looking up.
Its interesting that there are about 2900 students attending the Flagler College and there is no vandalism. It would really be easy to trash a place like this, but they take a lot of pride in being here.
Here is another hotel that Flagler built called the Alcazar Hotel, now the City Hall.
Flagler built a hospital, jail, church, and other buildings to make St Augustine a desirable destination.
Our final stop to share in St Augustine is their lighthouse.
It was built in 1871 and first lit in 1874. Keepers quarters were added in 1880. Its 165 feet tall with a first order Fresnel lens.
It was restored in 1980 and the burned out keeper’s quarters were restored in 1988. The lighthouse is the oldest brick structure in St. Augustine. Its 219 steps take you up to the top for some great views of St. Augustine.
We enjoyed our visit here, however a couple things we would do differently. You really need some transportation to get around. It is a lot of walking, so we bought tickets on one of their trolley tours. This thing takes an hour to loop the city with stops at places they promote and sell “discount” admission tickets. We found that our senior rate in most places equaled their discounts. You had to buy them in advance, so if you got there and decided it wasn’t going to be worth it, too bad, they gotcha.
Everything has an admission of about $10 to see, which gets pretty costly after spending $25 each for the trolley tickets. Some of the stuff was a good value; others, not so much. Doing it over we have a better idea of what to see and we would just buy the trolley tickets and decide when we got to the places if they were of value.
