Explore St. Augustine

The Medieval Torture Museum at 100 St. George Street, opened in 2020, displays more than 100 replicas and originals of devices used for punishment and torture in medieval and early modern Europe. Each is shown with an explanation of its use, and the ticket includes an audio guide.

The St. Augustine Shipwreck Museum & Gallery near the old town's bayfront shows artefacts from shipwrecks off Florida and around the world, including finds from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha and objects linked to the Titanic. Exhibits explain how wrecks are located, salvaged and conserved.

The Colonial Quarter on St. George Street is a living-history site covering St. Augustine's Spanish and British colonial periods. Costumed interpreters demonstrate blacksmithing, musket firing and boat building among reconstructed houses, and a 10-metre wooden watchtower looks over the old town.

The St. Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum, opposite the Castillo de San Marcos, moved here from Key West in 2010. It shows original pirate artefacts, among them one of the few surviving Jolly Roger flags, Thomas Tew's treasure chest and gold from shipwrecks, with interactive rooms on life aboard a pirate ship.

Flagler College occupies the former Hotel Ponce de Leon, built by Henry Flagler in 1888 and designed by Carrère and Hastings in Spanish Renaissance style, with Tiffany glass and one of the first electric lighting systems in a hotel. Visitors see the courtyard and façades, and the college runs guided tours of the interior.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, on the north side of the Plaza de la Constitución, is the seat of the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine. The coquina church was completed in 1797 for the parish founded in 1565, rebuilt after an 1887 fire and given its bell tower then; murals inside depict the parish's history.

The Lightner Museum fills the former Hotel Alcazar, built for Henry Flagler in 1888 in Spanish Renaissance Revival style. Chicago publisher Otto Lightner bought it in 1946 for his collection of Gilded Age decorative arts: cut glass, Tiffany lamps, furniture, mechanical music instruments and Victorian curiosities.

Villa Zorayda on King Street was built in 1883 by Franklin Smith as a winter home, a one-tenth-scale reinterpretation of part of the Alhambra in Granada and one of the first buildings in poured concrete mixed with coquina. The museum shows its Moorish Revival rooms and Smith's collection of art and antiquities.

The Castillo de San Marcos is a Spanish masonry fort on Matanzas Bay, built of coquina stone between 1672 and 1695 to guard St. Augustine. It is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States; visitors walk its bastions, gun deck and vaulted rooms, now run by the National Park Service.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! St. Augustine opened in 1950 as the first permanent Ripley's museum. It fills Castle Warden, a Moorish Revival mansion of 1887 on San Marco Avenue, with oddities, artefacts and records collected by Robert Ripley and his successors.

The Bridge of Lions is a double-leaf bascule bridge of 1927 that carries the Mediterranean Revival style across Matanzas Bay, from the old town's Plaza to Anastasia Island. Two Carrara marble lions guard its western end; it was rebuilt to its original design between 2006 and 2010.

The González–Alvarez House, known as the Oldest House, has stood on St. Francis Street since the early 1700s, a coquina ground floor with a timber upper storey added under British rule. The St. Augustine Historical Society shows it on guided tours together with a museum, a garden and its research library.

Mission Nombre de Dios marks the place where Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed in 1565 and the first Mass of the settlement was said. The grounds by the Matanzas River hold the small Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche, rebuilt in 1915, a stainless-steel cross 63 metres tall raised in 1966, a museum and a modern church.

The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, north of the old town, stands on the site of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's 1565 landing and first settlement, and of the Timucua village of Seloy. The grounds hold the spring tied to the Ponce de León legend, excavation finds, a planetarium and reconstructed Timucua and mission buildings.

The Old St. Johns County Jail on San Marco Avenue was built in 1891 in Romanesque Revival style, its appearance kept hotel-like at Henry Flagler's request, and held prisoners until 1953. Costumed guides lead tours through the cells, the sheriff's quarters and the gallows yard.

The Oldest Store Museum on San Marco Avenue recreates C. F. Hamblen's general store, which traded in St. Augustine from about 1908 to 1960. Its shelves hold more than 100,000 items from the period, from patent medicines and corsets to farm tools, a penny-farthing and a steam tractor.

The St. Augustine Light on Anastasia Island was completed in 1874, a 50-metre brick tower painted in black and white spirals with a red lantern. Visitors climb its 219 steps to the gallery, and the 1876 keepers' house and grounds hold a maritime museum on the town's seafaring and shipwreck archaeology.

The St. Augustine Alligator Farm on Anastasia Island has shown crocodilians since 1893 and is the only zoo to keep all living species of crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials. Boardwalks cross a wading-bird rookery, and the park also keeps albino alligators, lemurs and birds.

Fort Mose Historic State Park, 3 km north of St. Augustine, marks Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, founded in 1738 as the first legally sanctioned free African settlement in what became the United States. Nothing of the original fort stands; a museum, a reconstructed earthwork, a trail and a boardwalk over the salt marsh tell its story.