St. Petersburg in the Spanish Colonial Period

Spanish Florida, the Pinellas Peninsula included, lasted until the 1821 cession to the United States, with a British interval from 1763 to 1784, and no Spanish town is recorded on the St. Petersburg site.

The Florida Department of State starts written Florida history with Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513 and dates the first permanent settlement to 1565, when Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine (Florida Department of State). In 1763 the British took Florida in a trade for Havana, Cuba, and divided it into East Florida and West Florida; Spain took back the rest of Florida in 1784 under the treaty that closed the American Revolution. The Adams-Onis Treaty then set the terms by which Spain handed Florida, and with it the Pinellas Peninsula, to the United States in 1821.

The City of St. Petersburg sums up the local result in one line: Spanish explorers came and went in the 1500s, and the St. Pete known today began to form much later, when people set up homesteads in the 1830s and 1840s (City of St. Petersburg). The Spanish years left the peninsula its name, Punta Pinal, and an archaeological record rather than a colonial town.

Possibly: the state marker at the Jungle Prada Site in St. Petersburg says some historians attribute that general vicinity to the April 12, 1528 Narvaez landing, which is a reported location, not a settled one.

The Florida Division of Historical Resources lists the Jungle Prada Site marker, year 2020, at 1620 Park Street North in St. Petersburg (Florida Division of Historical Resources). The marker says Narvaez and 300 men departed on an overland trek of which only four survived, and that over the next eight years those men walked to the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Europeans and African to cross North America.

Pinellas County puts the Narvaez arrival in 1528 and ties the county name to it: Pinellas comes from the Spanish Punta Pinal, point of pines, an accurate description when Narvaez discovered the area, 36 years after Columbus reached the Caribbean and 37 years before St. Augustine was founded (Pinellas County). The county's Tocobaga Temple Mound page gives a different head count, saying Narvaez came with 400 men, and names Cabeza de Vaca as one of the four survivors (Pinellas County Parks). Neither page explains the difference between 300 and 400. The county page also places the 1528 arrival at the Safety Harbor village it describes (Narvaez came here in 1528), while the state marker attributes the landing to the Jungle Prada vicinity only for some historians, so the two official accounts do not name the same spot.

The Tocobaga people lived around Tampa Bay and Boca Ciega Bay when the Spanish arrived, in towns such as the Jungle Prada village in St. Petersburg and the village at Safety Harbor that Spanish written records point to as their likely capital.

At Jungle Prada, the state marker says the Tocobaga inhabited a village from about 1000 to 1700 CE, that archaeologists think a chief lived on top of a 12-foot-high platform mound overlooking a plaza, and that a 900-foot-long midden mound holds the refuse of their main food, fish and shellfish from the bay (Florida Division of Historical Resources). It adds that diseases introduced by Spanish expeditions likely emptied the village, and that most former Tocobaga sites along Boca Ciega Bay were destroyed by 20th century urban development.

Pinellas County describes the Safety Harbor village, now inside Philippe Park, as home to between 400 and 2,500 people and a center of political and cultural influence (Pinellas County Parks). Its Temple Mound is the largest remaining mound in the Tampa Bay region, built of alternating layers of shell and sand. The county says archaeologists date occupation from as early as 900 AD to the late 1600s, that Spanish written records point to it as the likely Tocobaga capital, and that artifacts confirm Spaniards were there in the 1500s. The site is the type site of the Safety Harbor Culture.

The National Park Service places the 1539 de Soto landing in the general area of Shaw's Point in Bradenton, where De Soto National Memorial now marks it.

The Park Service says de Soto and his crew landed in 1539 on the west coast of Florida in the area historians believe is present day Tampa, that the United States De Soto Expedition Commission declared Shaw's Point the landing point in 1939, and that the Park Service acquired 30 acres of Shaw's Point in 1948 to create the memorial (National Park Service). Like Narvaez at Jungle Prada, the exact landfall is a historian's judgment, and the Park Service words it as the general area.

The sources differ on how the expedition that began at Tampa Bay ended. The state history page puts the death of de Soto near the Mississippi River in 1542, after his expedition wandered for four years (Florida Department of State); the National Park Service article says the journey ended in 1543, when he died of a fever (National Park Service). This guide gives both years.

De Soto National Memorial, the federal site that commemorates the 1539 landing, keeps posted hours. Its welcome area is open daily from 9:00am to 4:45pm, the grounds are open dawn to dusk, and the parking lot gates close at 5:00pm; the memorial does not open on Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years Day (National Park Service hours). No entrance pass is required (National Park Service fees). The mailing address is 8300 De Soto Memorial Hwy, Bradenton, FL 34209, phone 941 792-0458 x102. The two NPS pages disagree: the NPS article says the visitor center is open daily from 9:00am to 5:00pm (National Park Service), while the park's own hours page, last updated February 25, 2025, gives 9:00am to 4:45pm for the welcome area. The hours page is the park's operating schedule, and it adds that the park's winter season programs are paused during a change in staffing and opening procedures.

Pinellas County says Menendez, the founder of St. Augustine, came to the Tocobaga town at Safety Harbor in 1567 looking for a waterway to St. Augustine and left 30 men to found a mission, which was gone by January 1568.

The county's account continues that a Jesuit priest returned in January 1568 to find all 30 men killed and the Tocobaga village abandoned, and that European diseases, to which the people had no immunity, likely caused the decline of the Tocobaga (Pinellas County Parks). The waterway Menendez wanted, a direct route between Tampa Bay and St. Augustine, does not exist.

The same years appear in the federal record for the St. Petersburg site. The NPGallery record for the Jungle Prada Site, National Register number 03000007, with a date published of 2/4/2003, lists its significant years as 1566 and 1567 and its periods of significance from 1000 AD through 1749 (National Park Service NPGallery). The record lists the address as restricted, so the marker on Park Street North is the public reference point.

Three public places tell the Spanish period near St. Petersburg: the Jungle Prada Site marker on Park Street North, the Tocobaga Temple Mound at Philippe Park in Safety Harbor, and De Soto National Memorial in Bradenton.

Pinellas County asks visitors at Philippe Park to leave finds in place: federal, state and county laws prohibit digging, using metal detectors and removing artifacts, and anyone who finds arrowheads, pottery fragments or bones should tell park staff (Pinellas County Parks). The Safety Harbor Culture pottery and artifacts from the site are shown at the Safety Harbor Museum, according to the county.

The Jungle Prada marker itself makes the point that St. Petersburg lost most of this layer: of the Tocobaga sites along Boca Ciega Bay, most were destroyed by 20th century development, and Jungle Prada is the one that remains well preserved (Florida Division of Historical Resources). How the city itself formed after the homesteading years is a separate story in the St. Petersburg history section.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Florida Division of Historical Resources marker, the Pinellas County Tocobaga Temple Mound page, the Florida Department of State history pages and the National Park Service pages for De Soto National Memorial.