The Founding of St. Augustine, 1565

Spanish settlers under Pedro Menendez de Aviles came ashore on September 8, 1565 at a Timucuan village called Seloy and named their new town St. Augustine (National Park Service, Fort Matanzas).

The name came from the calendar. Land had first been sighted on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine, the Fort Matanzas account says, and the settlers carried the name to the spot where they landed (Fort Matanzas). The Florida Department of State writes the name as San Augustín (the Castillo founding page spells it San Agustín) and credits Menendez with establishing the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States (Florida Department of State).

The landing place is still marked. The Castillo de San Marcos history page sets it 300 yards north of the stone fort, at what is now the Mission of Nombre de Dios, where a 250 foot cross stands on the original landing site (National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos). St. Augustine lies fifteen miles north of Fort Matanzas, the park says (Fort Matanzas history).

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rereading the Department of State colonization history beside ten National Park Service pages from the Castillo, Fort Matanzas and Fort Caroline, including both parks' current fee pages.

Spain sent Menendez to remove a French Protestant colony, Fort Caroline, from land the Spanish crown claimed and to plant a Spanish settlement of its own (Department of State; Fort Matanzas).

Earlier Spanish efforts had not lasted. The Department of State recounts that Juan Ponce de León came ashore on the northeast coast sometime between April 2 and April 8, 1513, possibly near present-day St. Augustine, and named the land la Florida; his 1521 colonizing voyage to the southwest coast collapsed under attacks by native people; and Tristán de Luna y Arellano's 1559 settlement at Pensacola Bay was abandoned after two years (Department of State).

France then moved in. Jean Ribault explored the coast in 1562, and two years later René Goulaine de Laudonnière built Fort Caroline at the mouth of the St. Johns River, near present-day Jacksonville (Department of State). The Fort Matanzas park dates that Huguenot settlement to 1564 (Fort Matanzas stories). The colony offended King Philip II on several counts, the park explains: it sat on Spanish crown land, it lay beside the route of the treasure fleets and could serve as a base for French attacks, and its settlers were Huguenots, French Protestants (Fort Matanzas).

Both fleets sailed in May 1565. Ribault left France with more than 600 soldiers and settlers to resupply Fort Caroline, and Menendez reached the St. Johns River in August with some 800 people, shortly after the French; a brief chase at sea followed before the Spanish turned south to Seloy (Fort Matanzas). The Fort Caroline National Memorial describes the French side as three hundred colonists who left France to build a permanent settlement (National Park Service, Fort Caroline).

The founding day began with a Mass of Thanksgiving on shore and a meal to which Menendez invited the Seloy, the people whose village occupied the site (National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos).

The park names the celebrant as Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, the town's first pastor, and notes that September 8 was the church feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His chronicle recorded that the Seloy imitated what they saw, and the park says nothing more is known of what they thought (Castillo de San Marcos).

The menu is an educated guess, and the park presents it that way. From what the five Spanish ships carried, it suggests cocido, a stew of salted pork and garbanzo beans with garlic, served with hard sea biscuit and red wine; if the Seloy added food from their own stores, the meal could have included turkey, venison, gopher tortoise, mullet, maize, beans and squash (Castillo de San Marcos).

The park dates that thanksgiving 56 years before the Pilgrim thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation, but says it did not become the origin of a national annual tradition, which grew from British observances and from President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation of the last Thursday in November (Castillo de San Marcos).

Within weeks of the landing Menendez had taken Fort Caroline and killed most of the shipwrecked Frenchmen who surrendered at an inlet south of St. Augustine, which is why that inlet carries the name Matanzas, Spanish for slaughters (Fort Matanzas).

A storm decided the contest. Ribault put to sea on September 10 to strike the new Spanish town, but a hurricane drove his ships south and wrecked them between present-day Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral, while Menendez led a force against Fort Caroline, where most of the soldiers were absent, and captured it (Fort Matanzas). Laudonnière and the artist Jacques LeMoyne were among those who escaped to ships and returned to France, and Menendez sent the women and children by ship to Havana (Fort Matanzas). The Department of State adds that he renamed the captured post San Mateo (Department of State).

Menendez marched 70 soldiers to an inlet where 127 shipwrecked Frenchmen were cut off; they surrendered, 111 were killed and sixteen spared, among them a few who professed to be Catholic, some impressed Breton sailors and four artisans the town needed. A second group, Ribault among them, surrendered on October 12, and 134 were killed (Fort Matanzas). The Department of State summarizes the outcome as the killing of all the settlers except non-combatants and Frenchmen who professed the Roman Catholic faith (Department of State).

The park does not pass judgment. Its account ends with open questions about religion, orders, and whether the new town could have fed the prisoners through the winter (Fort Matanzas). France answered two years later, when Dominique de Gourgues retook San Mateo and killed its Spanish garrison, but the Department of State says the Spanish advance did not stop (Department of State).

St. Augustine survived as an outpost that indirectly defended the Spanish Caribbean and New Spain, watched its southern inlet and, from 1672, replaced its wooden forts with the stone Castillo de San Marcos (Fort Matanzas; Castillo de San Marcos).

The back door was watched early. As early as 1569 the Spanish kept a wooden watchtower and a thatched hut for six soldiers at Matanzas Inlet, with no guns; a runner or small boat warned the town when a ship appeared, and the park says warnings from the post brought help against English outlaws who captured the tower in 1683 and French pirates in 1686 (Fort Matanzas). The front door was harder to hold. Sir Francis Drake looted and burned the village in 1586, yet the Department of State says Spanish control was not diminished, and as late as 1600 Spain's power over the southeast was unquestioned (Department of State).

Money was the chronic problem. The town was never self-sufficient and depended on the situado, a yearly subsidy the viceroy of New Spain was supposed to send; by 1668 Florida was owed more than 400,000 pesos, eight years of payments, and the wooden fort was too rotten to carry cannon (Castillo de San Marcos). After pirates sacked the town in 1668, Queen Regent Mariana ordered the viceroy to pay the Florida funds on time, add money for a permanent fortress and support a 300 man garrison, and the English settlement of Charles Towne, reported in 1670 only two days' sail north, added a greater threat (Fort Matanzas; Castillo de San Marcos).

Governor Manuel de Cendoya broke ground for the Castillo on October 2, 1672, using coquina stone quarried by Indian laborers, and the two seaward bastions and the curtain between them stood 11 feet high when he died on March 8, 1673 (Castillo de San Marcos). The Fort Matanzas park dates construction from 1672 to 1695 (Fort Matanzas stories). In 1702 Carolinians under Colonel James Moore and their Creek allies destroyed the town but could not capture the Castillo (Department of State), and the park says it never fell to an enemy in battle (Castillo de San Marcos stories).

Not word for word: federal and state pages describe the founding's firsts in slightly different terms, and this guide reports each as written (Department of State; Castillo de San Marcos).

On the settlement itself, the Department of State says Menendez established the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States, while the First Thanksgiving page calls the town the first permanent European settlement in North America (Department of State; Castillo de San Marcos).

On the thanksgiving, two pages of the same park give different intervals. The First Thanksgiving page says the St. Augustine Mass came 56 years before the Pilgrim thanksgiving at Plymouth, and the park's Stories index says 55 years before the Pilgrims landed (First Thanksgiving; Castillo Stories). The first counts to the Pilgrim thanksgiving and the second to the Pilgrims' landing, and neither page reconciles the two.

On the size of the expeditions, the Fort Matanzas account gives Ribault more than 600 soldiers and settlers, and the Fort Caroline memorial says three hundred colonists left France; the first describes the 1565 resupply voyage, the Fort Caroline page does not say which voyage its figure covers, and the park pages do not set them side by side (Fort Matanzas; Fort Caroline). The Fort Matanzas Stories page says the founding began 235 years of Spanish control of Florida, and the same page lists a British Period from 1763 to 1784 (Fort Matanzas stories).

Three National Park Service sites tell the founding story: Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Fort Matanzas on the inlet to the south, and Fort Caroline in Jacksonville (Castillo fees; Fort Matanzas fees; Fort Caroline).

Castillo de San Marcos National Monument lists its mailing address as 1 South Castillo Drive, St. Augustine, phone 904 829-6506. Adults 16 and over pay $15, valid for 7 consecutive days; children 15 and under enter free with an adult; the park takes only credit and debit cards; and a Castillo annual pass costs $45 (National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos fees). The landing site and cross at the Mission of Nombre de Dios lie 300 yards north of the fort (Castillo de San Marcos).

Fort Matanzas National Monument lists its mailing address as 8635 A1A South, phone 904 471-0116. Every area of the park is free, including the ferry to the fort, but each visitor of any age needs a free boarding pass from the Fort Matanzas Visitor Center, not the St. Augustine city visitor center, and the park says it has a timed entry system for which a reservation may be needed in advance (National Park Service, Fort Matanzas fees). The fort on the inlet dates from 1740 to 1742, long after the events that named the river (Fort Matanzas stories).

Fort Caroline National Memorial, mailing address 12713 Fort Caroline Road, Jacksonville, phone 904-641-7155, remembers the short-lived French colony and hosts the visitor center for the Timucuan Preserve (National Park Service, Fort Caroline).