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 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.

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.

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 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 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.