St. Augustine History Museum

St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish in 1565, which makes it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States — and this museum covers the four centuries that most visitors, busy photographing the fort, never quite get to.

The galleries move through Timucua and Seminole material culture, the Spanish founding and its long colonial aftermath, the British interval, and the city's late nineteenth-century reinvention as a winter resort for wealthy northerners under Henry Flagler. Salvage and shipwreck artefacts, weapons, tools and domestic objects fill the cases.

It is modest in scale and easily seen in an hour, which suits its position in the cluster of attractions just north of the old city gate — a short walk from the Castillo de San Marcos and the pedestrian length of St. George Street.