Florida Family Vacations

St Augustine

You can turn the clock back centuries in St Augustine, the oldest city in Florida. The city provides half-dozen ways to explore its city. In addition to the usual car, bus and foot tours, St Augustine also offers horse-drawn carriage rides to historic points of interest with most carriage drives offering a flavorful narration on the city's history and sights. There is also a sightseeing train that motors down the narrow one-way streets. Finally, there are 75-minute cruises along the city's edge and around Matanzas Bay.

Throughout the city, bits of history beckons your attention. What better place to start than the Fountain of Youth, a memorial park on the site where Ponce de Leon is believed to have first set foot on his fruitless search for a spring that would provide eternal youth. Past a stone arch, you will find a natural spring bubbling in a shelter built of coquina (a soft limestone made up of broken seashells and coral). Many visitors like to take a taste.

No visit to St Augustine is complete without stopping to wonder at the massive fortress that dominates the bay, Castillo de San Marcos. Built between 1672 and 1695 by the Spanish, it is a huge symmetrical fort surrounded by a moat. The fortess was never occupied. Guided tours are available.

Take a walk down St George Street and you'll get a strong taste of the colonial era. Refreshingly, cars are barred from the narrow brick-paved streets which are lined with quaint old shops and homes. Just inside the City Gate is the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse (open daily) which was built by the Spanish as a private home and later became a school.

For the lighter side of St Augustine, go to Ripley's Believe It of Not! on San Marco Avenue and marvel at a bizarre collection of thousands of oddities and artifacts. Across the bay on Anastasia Boulevard, the St Augustine Alligator Farm is another of the city's "oldests." Opened in 1893, it makes the plausible claim to be "the world's original alligator attraction."