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Castillo de San Marcos National Monument stands on Florida's northeastern coast in the city of St. Augustine, St. Johns County. Its roughly 8 hectares (19 acres) preserve the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States.
Image from the National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas page on Castillo de San Marcos.
History
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1672–1695 | Spain builds the fort to guard maritime trade routes; it is one of the first permanent European settlements in the continental U.S. |
| Over the centuries | Built on, altered and adapted by the armies of Spain, Great Britain, the Confederate States and the United States |
| October 15, 1924 | Proclaimed Fort Marion National Monument |
| June 5, 1942 | Renamed Castillo de San Marcos National Monument |
The monument protects 11 historic structures:
- a moat around most of the fort;
- a ravelin, a triangular fortification;
- a covered way and a grassy glacis;
- the City Gate pillars;
- a seawall and a water battery;
- a hot shot furnace;
- the reconstructed Cubo Line of defensive walls.
Geologic setting
The monument lies in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Beneath it is a series of well-developed marine terraces that step down in both elevation and age toward the ocean — ancient shorelines left by sea-level changes from the Pleistocene to the present.
The ground at the site itself is young, Quaternary material: beach ridges, dunes and undifferentiated sediments.
Built from the local rock
The Pleistocene Anastasia Formation isn't exposed at the monument, but it supplied the fort's building stone: coquina, quarried locally from that formation.
Maps and inventories
Products of the Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory for the monument, and its completed Soil Resources Inventory project, are available through the NPS DataStore.
Image from the National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas page on Castillo de San Marcos.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, Florida," National Park Service, which cites Brown (1997), Colquhoun (1969), Richards et al. (1971) and National Park Service reports (2016); a work of the United States government in the public domain.
In these publicationsCastillo de San Marcos National Monument
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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