Castillo de San Marcos (courtesy of Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources)

Florida’s Spanish Colonial Heritage

Florida's Spanish colonial heritage began nearly 100 years before Jamestown with Juan Ponce de León's 1513 landing and ended when Florida became a territory of the United States in 1821. The first attempts by the Spanish to explore and settle Florida were met with hardships from the weather and native populations. Permanent settlement was achieved with the founding of St. Augustine in 1565 and spread to the interior of the Florida through the establishment of Franciscan missions. In 1698, Spain built a second Florida settlement in Pensacola. France and England vied for control of the Spanish colony and posed constant threats to the settlements on the Spanish colonial frontier of Florida. The British won control of Florida in 1763, but returned Florida to Spain a mere 20 years later in 1783. The Second Spanish period saw an influx of many ethnicities. Due to mounting debts and increasing pressure from the United States, Spain ceded Florida to the U.S. in 1821. The effect of nearly three centuries under Spanish rule, however, had left its mark, and today Florida's Spanish colonial heritage remains one of the most defining characteristics of the state.

Located by accident during Juan Ponce de León's 1513 exploratory voyage west from Puerto Rico through the Bahamas, Florida soon became the focus of early European exploration and settlement of the southeastern United States. When de León returned to Florida shores eight years later with two colonial ships, he was repulsed and mortally wounded by Native American attacks not long after landing. Though de León's 1521 colonial expedition was clearly a failure, it was only the first of six abortive Spanish settlement attempts that preceded the 1565 establishment of St. Augustine. Following Ponce's initial landing in 1513 were: Lúcas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526, Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528, Hernando de Soto in 1539, Fray Luís Cancer in 1549, and Tristán de Luna y Arellano in 1559. The establishment of St. Augustine in 1565 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés marked the first successful Spanish colonization of Florida. While the initial effort to colonize was a privately-financed enterprise, after 1570 an annual situado or stipend from the Spanish crown kept up the otherwise unprofitable colony within the broader Spanish empire.

Re-enactment at Juan Ponce de León Landing Park (page 52/53; courtesy of Brevard County Historical Commission, Cocoa)

Permanent Settlement and Missionization
Spanish Florida's first years under Menéndez were characterized by rapid military expansion both north and south of St. Augustine. A string of coastal forts extended around the southern tip of the Florida peninsula, and another chain of interior forts pushed northwest from Santa Elena and across the Appalachian summit. In the face of widespread local Native American resistance, all but Florida's twin port cities of St. Augustine and Santa Elena had been overthrown or withdrawn by 1570. In the aftermath of Santa Elena's abandonment in 1587, St. Augustine remained the principal hub of colonial Spanish Florida through the rest of the First Spanish period (1513-1763).

Artifacts from one of Tristán de Luna's shipwrecks (courtesy of Archaeology Institute, University of West Florida, Pensacola)

After 1587, Franciscan missionaries, rather than military or government officials, led Spanish expansion from St. Augustine. By the end of the 16th century, they had pushed north along the coast through Northeast Florida and into the present-day Georgia coastline. By the mid-1630s the missionaries had moved westward into the populous Apalachee province of the present-day Tallahassee area. One by one, Native American chiefdoms willingly became a part of the expanding Spanish colonial system. While no more than 3,000 Spanish soldiers and colonists lived in Florida's original port city of St. Augustine, as many as 30,000 or more converted Native Americans still lived at any given time in hundreds of indigenous communities within the mission provinces of Apalachee, Timucua, Mocama, and Guale (pronounced wall ee). Together, they formed part of a far-flung network of local and regional societies under the administrative umbrella of Spanish St. Augustine. Missions were linked economically by the tributary exchange of labor and foodstuffs, particularly corn. Hereditary chiefs still governed local secular affairs within the mission provinces, while spiritual affairs for new Christian converts fell under the charge of solitary Franciscan missionaries distributed across the vast region. In the mid-17th century, Spanish Florida had become a multi-ethnic colonial society with less than 10% immigrant (mostly Spanish and African) populations living predominantly in St. Augustine, and more than 90% indigenous populations extending across northern Florida and into southeastern Georgia. Land and water routes, both inland and maritime, connected this new colonial society into a functioning whole, marking the first successful European penetration into the Southeastern United States.

Castillo de San Marcos (courtesy of Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources)

Two factors–disease and slaving–ultimately doomed this 17th-century system. Sporadic epidemic population loss throughout the mission period led to the inability to produce enough corn to support the mission network and the military garrison at St. Augustine. Inhabitants abandoned small villages and missions and moved to larger mission centers along primary transportation corridors. Beginning in 1661, and accelerating through the beginning of the 18th century, English-allied Native American groups such as the Westo, Yamasee, and Creek, pushed aggressively into Spanish territory. They enslaved or murdered literally tens of thousands of Native Americans living in missions in a campaign that was motivated by both financial profit and territorial gain. These English-sponsored raids led to the total demise of the Spanish mission system in Florida by 1706. Subsequently even the unconverted provinces of South Florida were nearly slaved out of existence, with refugees flooding both St. Augustine and Havana, Cuba by 1711. Raiders even harassed the recently-established westernmost presidio in Spanish Florida, Santa María de Galve in Pensacola, founded in 1698 to serve as a buffer to French encroachment from the Mississippi River corridor.

Colonial Spanish Quarter (page 34/35; courtesy of Susan Van Fleet, St. Augustine)

Colonial Battlefield
By the second decade of the 18th century, the interior of Spanish Florida was framed by two colonial garrison communities–St. Augustine in the east, and Pensacola in the west. In 1715, however, the widespread Yamasee War against the southern British colonies transformed Florida's interior. The unoccupied mission interior increasingly became dominated by hunters and traders from the Native Americans group known as Creeks, many of whom would eventually form the nucleus of the emergent Seminole tribe. In response, the Spanish crown re-established San Marcos de Apalache in 1718 along the Gulf coast, south of modern Tallahassee. Far to the south, Cuban fishermen increasingly plied the coastal waters of South Florida, hiring and trading with remnant populations of indigenous Calusa and other groups living in and around the Florida Keys.

Cannon from Presidio Santa María de Galve. (page 14/15; courtesy of Archaeology Institute, University of West Florida)

British Period
British aggression from the north continued. Former Spanish territory in coastal Georgia came under British control after 1733, and St. Augustine was virtually destroyed in 1740 during the War of Jenkins Ear. Raids by Englishallied factions of the Creeks increased during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) against all remaining Spanish and Native American communities. In the aftermath of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Spain finally surrendered Florida to British control in exchange for the return of Havana, Cuba, leading to a mass exodus of all remaining Spanish populations in the three surviving Florida settlements (St. Augustine, San Marcos, and Pensacola). Remaining Spanish-allied indigenous groups fled to Cuba and Mexico.

1783 map of St. Augustine (courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. G3934.S2 1783.L6)

Second Spanish Period
Spanish interest in Florida never disappeared during the British Period (1763-1783). Cuban fishing continued uninterrupted along the coast of Southwest Florida, as did routine intelligence-gathering by Spanish-allied Creeks on the Gulf coast and Catholic Minorcan settlers at New Smyrna along the Atlantic coast. The British split the administration of Florida into East Florida, with St. Augustine as the capital, and West Florida, with Pensacola as the capital. After Spain declared war against Britain in 1779, the successive captures of British Mobile and Pensacola in 1780 and 1781 paved the way for Spain to reclaim both East and West Florida in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. During this Second Spanish Period (1783-1821), Spain encouraged immigration by non-Spanish settlers into Florida, while simultaneously attempting to strengthen trade and diplomatic relations with the Creek and Seminole tribes through the British firm Panton, Leslie, & Company. Seminole numbers swelled in the Florida interior with Creek immigration. Escaped African slaves from the American colonies to the north were also welcomed as free men and women. During the same period, growing numbers of Anglo-American settlers increasingly diluted the Spanish character of the colony, including the short-lived establishment of the "Republics" of West and East Florida in 1810 and 1812. General Andrew Jackson led military incursions into Spanish Florida in 1814 and defeated the British fleet harbored in Pensacola Bay. These attacks ultimately prefaced Spain's decision to relinquish all Florida territory to the United States in exchange for a cancellation of debts in 1821.

1805 Lavalle House, Pensacola (page 10/11; courtesy of West Florida Preservation, Inc.)

Though the colonial expansion of permanent Spanish settlement in Florida was gradual and limited in scope, the colonial Spanish presence in Florida left an indelible mark on the landscape and had a profound effect on the course of history in this state. By the end of the Spanish Colonial period in 1821, Florida had been claimed by Spain for 288 years. In 2009, Florida will have spent only 188 years as an American territory and state. As modern Florida becomes increasingly multi-ethnic in the 21st century, understanding and commemorating our Spanish colonial heritage is all the more important.

Re-enactors at Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine (courtesy of VISIT FLORIDA)