The St. Augustine Lighthouse

There has been something standing at this spot watching for ships since before there was a United States to watch for them.

In 1589 the Italian cartographer Giovanni Battista Boazio published a map of Sir Francis Drake's raid on St. Augustine three years earlier. That map is the first documented archival reference to a wooden watchtower at the end of Anastasia Island. The Spanish crown put those towers up while the Castillo de San Marcos was being built, to stop enemy ships taking the island. The one at the north end eventually became this lighthouse. The one at the south end became Fort Matanzas National Monument.

By 1737 the Spanish had replaced the earlier structure with a 30-foot watchtower of coquina and wood, and a canoe was kept at the centinella to help whoever was stationed there. Spanish and British governments both operated aids to navigation on this spot, a run of wooden towers and beacons going back to 1565.

The American territorial government lit Florida's first official lighthouse here in May 1824, on the site of that earlier Spanish watchtower. The tower you can climb today is the second one, built between 1871 and 1874 at the north end of Anastasia Island.

It is a working lighthouse and a privately maintained aid to navigation, still lit. The tower, its original first-order Fresnel lens and the light station grounds belong to the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum, a not-for-profit that opens 360 days a year. Admission keeps the lighthouse and five other historic structures standing, and funds programmes in maritime archaeology, traditional wooden boatbuilding and maritime education.

The museum states its purpose plainly: to discover, preserve and present the stories of the nation's oldest port, as symbolised by a lighthouse that still works. Climb it. The view is the point of the building.