Bosque Bello Cemetery

Bosque Bello Cemetery was established in 1798, when Fernandina lay within the Spanish province of East Florida. The land formed part of a Spanish land grant issued to Domingo Fernandez, who donated the parcel to the city in the early 1800s for burial use. The cemetery's name — "beautiful woods" — reflects its setting under a canopy of live oaks, with Spanish moss draping the older sections.

The oldest legible grave belongs to French soldier Peter Bouissou de Nicar, dated 1813. Subsequent decades layered burials reflecting the island's unusually complex political history. Amelia Island passed through eight different flags in the early 19th century — Spanish, French, English, Patriot, Green Cross of Florida, Mexican Republic, Confederate, and American — and the cemetery's markers reflect that turnover. Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans rest in marked sections. The Sisters of Saint Joseph, French Catholic nuns who arrived in Fernandina to teach the children of formerly enslaved families after the Civil War, are buried in a marked Catholic plot. Several of the sisters died nursing Yellow Fever victims during the 1877 epidemic that struck the port heavily.

Notable later burials include Sollecito Salvador, the Sicilian immigrant remembered as the father of Fernandina's shrimping industry, and Domingo Acosta, who served as Old Fernandina's first postmaster in 1821. Sections of the cemetery are still bordered by tabby walls — a Lowcountry construction of oyster shells, lime, and sand — which give the older plots a distinctly coastal Southern texture.

The cemetery remains an active municipal burial ground maintained by the City of Fernandina Beach, with a volunteer Friends of Bosque Bello group supporting documentation and preservation.