The beauty of St Augustine, at least from my perspective, is in its architecture. In the centre of town you can’t walk a block without seeing some kind of stunning building or other.

A lot of that is owing to the vision of the industrialist Henry Flagler, who is responsible for Memorial Presbyterian (see yesterday’s post), and a number of the old hotels (now in other use) around the town centre. His vision for a resort town in St Augustine eventuated in these two incredible building, the Ponce de Leon Hotel, which is now the main campus for Flagler College a liberal arts university and the Alcazar Hotel (now the Lightner Museum). The gallery contains a couple of bonus images… the constitution monument, and the  Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, the catholic basilica at the bottom of the popular George St.

Inside the dome

Cupola detail

Loving the Gargoyles (they’re water spouts!)

Reflection of the Teracotta in the Carp pond inside the Lightner courtyard

Constitution Monument

Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine

In my years in and out of the religous community of some shape or other it was never the Presbyterians I’d have expected to be prone to excess.. the Catholics? the Orthodox? Sure… But the Presbyterians? … not so much…

After a visit around this place comissioned by the magnate Henry Flager, responsible for much of the grandeur of St Augustine, I realise it was a misapprehension… as you can see from the pix below…

Read more about the church on Wikipedia or on their website.

I hadn’t ever heard of St Augustine until someone mentioned it when I talked about my desire to do some travel through Savannah and Charleston… I have no idea who it was, I’m pretty sure it was while I was at WordCamp San Francisco, but the rest is a blank. But I must have filed the idea away, because when I started looking at it to see what its story was, I couldn’t resist… So, when I was cooking up a week in the South, St Augustine was first on the list…

On my first day there I walked into town, and started at a place called the Welcome Center… and well, it wasn’t what I expected. It SOUNDS like it’s the local visitor centre… come in, look around grab brochures, ask a few questions and move on… but this one was all about getting you onto one of the Old Town trolley tours and/or into one of their random tourist traps. I felt sold to, and came out a little ticked. That’s the choleric personality for you… hates feeling controlled or manipulated… SO, I didn’t buy a trolley ticket, preferring to walk everywhere, but I did follow my nose to their most visited attraction, the Old Jail.

The random tourist trap of the St Augustine History Museum, Old Jail, and the Old Store were in the end, worth checking out, though the Museum left a fair amount to be desired the focus there being the tacky junk in the souvenir shop. However, the exhibits in the Jail and Store were interesting enough, and the tour guides were entertaining, and knowledgable.

So, without further ado, here’s a gallery of pix from the Old Jail, and the Oldest Store Museum Experience…

Thie Misson Nombre de Dios is the site of the landing of the first settlers in St Augustine, the first permanent Christian settlement in the US. Now a beautiful park on the Matanzas River it’s a great place for sitting with a book and a thermos flask of coffee.

Until a school groups show up…