Approach St. Augustine from the Atlantic Ocean side and you’ll see the Old City Gates and fort. Nestled on Matanzas Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, St. Augustine was founded in 1565 and is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the contiguous United States.
This location has been a blessing and a curse, as it is easily accessible to other coastal areas, but also open to attack from the sea. The earliest settlement belonged to indigenous people, the Timucua. After the arrival of Spanish navigator Juan Ponce de Leon, many other European settlers soon came. Consider what life would have been like during those early times when St. Augustine was the capital of Spanish Florida.
The English fleet attacked in 1702 while inhabitants took shelter in the fort, Castillo de San Marcos. The city was destroyed but the fort proved unconquerable. After the unsuccessful siege, St. Augustine was considered too vulnerable for attacks, so gates and defense structures, known as redoubts, were built from earth and logs. The improved defense system was called the Cubo Line. Imagine the increased sense of security people must have felt entering their town through gates that included sentry boxes.
A test of the new defense came later that century from English forces again, but the resistance proved too difficult and the attack was discontinued. The Spanish reinforced the gates and barriers by constructing structures from coquina, a combination of limestone and seashells. Upon Florida’s unification with America, the original gate was destroyed. It was reconstructed in the late 1800s, the beginning of the preservation of the Old City Gates. Visit this National Park Service attraction to fully appreciate St. Augustine when it was a walled city.
See the Old City Gate landmark on the northern part of St. George Street that leads into the city’s old sector with its historic pedestrian mall. West of the gate is one of the redoubts near the intersection of Cordova and Orange streets. When visiting the fort, look for another section of the Cubo Line stretching in the opposite direction.
