An English privateer burned St. Augustine, and Spain answered by building the fort that is still standing.
Robert Searles raided the town in 1668, destroyed much of it and damaged the wooden fort defending it. Governor Francisco de la Guerra y de la Vega ordered a permanent replacement. Work began under his successor Manuel de Cendoya in 1671, the Spanish engineer Ignacio Daza drew the design, and the first coquina stones were laid in 1672, one hundred and seven years after Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded the city. The core of the fortress was finished in 1695.
Coquina is the reason it is here at all. The walls are cut from the local shellstone quarried on Anastasia Island across the bay, and the Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. It stands on the western shore of Matanzas Bay.
The flags changed repeatedly and the fort did not. Britain took Florida under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, made St. Augustine the capital of British East Florida and renamed the place Fort St. Mark. The Peace of Paris in 1783 handed Florida back to Spain and the old name returned. Spain signed the Adams-Onis Treaty in 1819, Florida passed to the United States in 1821, and the fort became a US Army base renamed Fort Marion after the Revolutionary War commander Francis Marion.
It was declared a National Monument in 1924 and deactivated in 1933, after 251 years of continuous military possession. That is the number worth sitting with: from 1672 to 1933, somebody's soldiers held this ground without a break.
The 20.48 acre site went to the National Park Service, which now tells the Castillo's stories as both tragic and triumphant, and covers the many different peoples who shaped it rather than only the ones who built it.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
