Biohazard Cleanup Near Ocean Cay St. Augustine, FL

St. Augustine was founded on September 8, 1565, by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés — more than four decades before the English founded Jamestown.

It is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the contiguous United States, and it served as the capital of Spanish Florida for more than 200 years.

St. Augustine is the county seat of St. Johns County, on Florida's Atlantic coast about 40 miles south of downtown Jacksonville.

The 2020 census counted 14,329 residents in St. Augustine, and the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate had already climbed to 16,141.

Census QuickFacts counts about 6,529 households in St. Augustine (2020-2024), averaging just 2.13 people per household, with about 63 percent of homes owner-occupied.

The Castillo de San Marcos, begun by the Spanish in 1672 and completed in 1695, is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, built from coquina, a local stone formed of compressed seashells.

In 1738 the governor of Spanish Florida established Fort Mose just north of the city — the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States, led by militia captain Francisco Menéndez, himself a freedom seeker.

The Mission Nombre de Dios marks the 1565 landing site of Menéndez's expedition, where a Thanksgiving Mass was celebrated; it is home to America's oldest Marian shrine.

Flagler College's campus centerpiece is the former Hotel Ponce de Leon, Henry Flagler's Gilded Age resort that opened in 1888 as one of the first buildings in the United States wired for electricity from the start, with generators installed under Thomas Edison.

The Ponce de Leon was the first building of its kind constructed entirely of poured concrete, using local coquina stone as aggregate, and college students still dine beneath 79 Louis Comfort Tiffany stained-glass windows in its dining hall.