St. Johns County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on St. Johns County

On 8 September 1565 the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led a landing party ashore at what is now the St. Augustine waterfront, planted a cross, claimed the territory for the Crown of Castile, and founded the colonial settlement that has continuously held a Spanish, English, or American flag every single day since — making St. Augustine the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the contiguous United States, predating Jamestown by 42 years and the Plymouth landing by 55. The Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (commissioned 1672, completed 1695, never breached in combat) is the oldest masonry fortification in the contiguous US, built from coquina — a sedimentary stone composed of compressed Pleistocene marine seashells quarried directly from Anastasia Island's beach dunes.

Coquina's structural genius is that incoming cannonballs lodge in the soft matrix rather than shattering the wall, a property the 1702 English siege under Governor James Moore discovered the hard way after 50 days of bombardment failed to crack the curtain. St. Johns County wraps the historic city core (designated a National Historic Landmark District), Anastasia State Park on the barrier island east of the Bridge of Lions (139 RV-friendly sites accepting rigs to 35 ft with electric hookups, reservation via Florida State Parks 11 months ahead), and the affluent Ponte Vedra Beach corridor north of the Bridge of Lions. Fort Matanzas National Monument 14 miles south guards the secondary southern inlet that English forces would have used to bypass the Castillo. The St. Augustine historic district bans RV street parking entirely; commercial RV lots concentrate along US-1 north of the city.