We were picked up by a shuttle at the campground and taken the short distance to the historic part of St. Augustine. We got tickets for the narrated train tour through the city. We visited the Castillo de San Marcos, a fort built between 1672 and 1695. The fort was made entirely of coquina stone and its walls are four feet thick at the top and 10 feet thick at the base. Coquina stone is a sedimentary stone formed by shells and fossils. The fort provided a stronghold for the Spanish settlement and the residents of St. Augustine. Although the fort was under the control of Spain and Britain and then Spain, all of the changes were due to treaty as the fort never fell to a siege.The tour continued to "The Fountain of Youth" and the landing site of Juan Ponce de Leon who landed here on April 3, 1513. A stone cross on the ground adjacent to the Fountain of Youth contains 15 stones long and 13 stones across marking the year 1513. The longest permanent settlement in North America, St. Augustine, was started in 1565.
We saw the hotels built by Henry Flagler, a self-made millionaire who was personally responsible for turning Florida into a tourist destination. His Ponce de Leon hotel was the most modern and luxurious hotel of its time. Every room had a fireplace, it was one of the first hotels to have electricity (installed by Thomas Edison), and it was decorated with millions of dollars worth of stained glass by Tiffany. A second hotel the Alcazar Hotel was built to provide entertainment for the guest at the Ponce de Leon Hotel. The hotel had Turkish baths, a huge covered indoor pool, movies, tennis, bowling, shooting galleries, and dance halls.
After our tour we came back home and then took our car to dinner at a local seafood restaurant recommended by the owner of the local bead store. Tomorrow we will head to Savannah, GA.