Castillo de San Marcos National MonumentSeite 9 von 14

Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas: The Landscapes of Two Spanish Forts in Florida

Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas, in northeastern Florida, are the best-preserved evidence of the 287 years the Spanish Empire spent in southeastern North America. Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fortification remaining in the continental United States and the core of the defenses of St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States. Fort Matanzas stands about 14 miles south on Rattlesnake Island. This article is adapted from a National Park Service (NPS) Cultural Landscape Report on both national monuments.

Sketch plan of Castillo de San Marcos in 1785, a four-cornered fort with its rooms and defensive features

Map of Castillo de San Marcos in 1785. NPS.

From Spanish fort to national monument

Year	Event
1672–1695	Spain builds Castillo de San Marcos beside the Matanzas River and its harbor
1740–1742	Spain builds Fort Matanzas, a series of towers from which soldiers watched for enemy ships
1763	Both forts pass to Britain, which renames Castillo de San Marcos Fort St. Mark
1784	Both return to Spain
1821	The United States takes both when Florida becomes a territory
1825	The War Department renames Castillo de San Marcos Fort Marion
1924	Both are declared national monuments (October 15)
1933	The War Department transfers them to the National Park Service
1942	An Act of Congress restores the name Castillo de San Marcos

Spain used the labor of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, convicts, hired workers and soldiers to build the forts and grow food for the settlement. Contact with the Spanish devastated the tribes, who had no immunity to the new diseases. The Timucua and Guale were among the hardest hit, and the Apalachee, too, played a major part in the story through enslavement, conquest and conversion. From 1821 to 1900 the War Department kept a small garrison at Castillo de San Marcos, using it for storage and as a military prison; many Native Americans were held there after conflicts in Florida and the American West. By the end of the 1800s Fort Matanzas was in poor condition, its foundation split into three sections.

Why it is significant

The National Register of Historic Places recognizes two periods for Castillo de San Marcos, 1672 to 1821, the Colonial period, and 1821 to 1924, when the War Department ran it. The fort is significant for military history and as the oldest masonry fortification in the country. It is tied to Osceola, who led the Seminoles against the U.S. Army in the Second Seminole War. He came under a flag of truce to negotiate in October 1837, was seized and imprisoned at the fort, and in December was sent to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, where he died on January 30, 1838.

A large tree beside the stone wall that forms the edge of the moat along the outside wall of a fort

A section of the moat and outside wall of Castillo de San Marcos. NPS.

In the 1890s the War Department turned the grounds into a park-like landscape with walkways, trees and benches, which functioned as a public park for the people of St. Augustine. It held an exhibition baseball game in 1885 with the Cuban Giants, a professional African American team, and Florida’s first golf course. The NPS later removed many features of that period.

A group of golfers in 1902 on turf beside a wooden stair over a stone defensive structure, with the fort in the background

Golf at Castillo de San Marcos, c. 1902. Detroit Publishing Co., William Henry Jackson, photographer. Library of Congress.

Fort Matanzas is linked to the Ribault Massacre of 1565. French Huguenots had founded Fort Caroline in 1564, in what is now Jacksonville. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was sent to remove them, and he and his men took Fort Caroline and massacred shipwrecked French soldiers marching back toward it. With the French gone, Spain made St. Augustine its capital in Florida and built wooden watchtowers along the Matanzas River. The coquina-masonry fort is important for its architecture, and its headquarters and visitor center are examples of the NPS rustic style.

A person standing near the corner of a stone fortification with a rectangular watchtower on one side

Side view of Fort Matanzas, c. 1934. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

What the landscape looks like

Castillo de San Marcos follows seventeenth-century bastion-system design: a symmetrical fort with four corner bastions, curtain walls, embrasures, a glacis and a moat, with earthworks outside to keep attackers back. Its coquina walls, a rock of consolidated shell fragments, sand and limestone, are thirty feet high, ten to fourteen feet thick at the base and five feet thick at the top. The moat surrounds three sides now; the Army Corps of Engineers altered its eastern section when it built the water battery in 1842 to 1844, and rebuilt the seawall in the 1830s and 1840s.

A stone furnace on turf beside the seaward walls of a fortification

Hotshot furnace beside the seaward battlement walls at Castillo de San Marcos. NPS.

Labeled site plan of existing conditions at Castillo de San Marcos

Site plan from the Cultural Landscape Report showing existing conditions at Castillo de San Marcos. NPS.

The open ground is mostly turf with live oak, red cedar and cabbage palm. The trees date mainly from the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is quite unlike the open military landscape of the Spanish period. Keeping low turf replicates the 1880s look, and Bermuda grass is the best match for that period. More information would be needed to know what grew there in the Spanish colonial period.

Fort Matanzas is much smaller, with a parapet wall, a sentry watchtower and a thirty-foot-high observation deck, also built of local coquina. A ferry carries visitors from the visitor center across the Matanzas River.

Aerial view of Fort Matanzas in the 1970s, showing land added to preserve the fort’s foundations

Fort Matanzas in the 1970s, with the land added to preserve its foundations. NPS.

The 2020 report

The NPS produced the Cultural Landscape Report in 2020 to establish the landscape’s significance and recommend treatment that preserves historic resources while handling modern use, including visitor use, turf management and resilience to natural hazards. Its aims are to improve interpretation by preserving or rehabilitating features that existed in the periods of significance, and to help the landscape withstand rising visitation. The report was prepared by WLA Studio.

Sources

National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas National Monuments Cultural Landscapes, adapted from the 2020 Cultural Landscape Report prepared by WLA Studio; a photograph credited to Carol Highsmith is left out, and a quick-facts date range that disagreed with the text is not repeated; rewritten in hubnx’s own words.