St. Augustine, the oldest US city, was founded
On this day · 8 September 1565
Decades before Jamestown or Plymouth, a Spanish admiral planted a town in Florida that has never been abandoned since.
On September 8, 1565, Spanish admiral Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore on Florida’s Atlantic coast and founded St. Augustine, naming it for the saint whose feast day fell on August 28, when his fleet first sighted land. He arrived with roughly 800 colonists, including soldiers, families, and approximately 50 Africans, both free and enslaved.
The settlement took root on the territory of the Timucua people and soon became the capital of Spanish Florida. It survived raids, sieges, and changes of flag, and today stands as the oldest continuously occupied European-established town in the United States.
St. Augustine was founded 42 years before Jamestown and 55 years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock.
That unbroken occupation is what sets it apart. Many earlier European footholds in the Americas failed or were abandoned, but St. Augustine endured — a rare living link to the first century of European settlement north of Mexico.
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