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1672 Spanish Coquina Fortress, Oldest Masonry Fort in the United States
11 S Castillo Dr, St. Augustine, FL 32084
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
National Park Service admission fee per adult; America the Beautiful interagency annual pass accepted; under 16 free.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Stone fortress with the lower courtyard accessible; upper gun deck reached by stairs only
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1672 · National Monument · Oldest US Masonry Fortress · Spanish Colonial Florida · Native American Incarceration Site · Coquina Construction
Spain founded St. Augustine in 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States. Wooden forts had defended the town for more than a century when a 1668 raid by the English privateer Robert Searles destroyed much of the city and damaged the existing fortification. In response, Spanish Governor Francisco de la Guerra y de la Vega ordered the construction of a permanent stone fort.
Military engineer Ignacio Daza designed the four-bulwark star-shaped Castillo using locally quarried coquina, a sedimentary limestone composed of compressed seashells. Coquina is soft when freshly cut and hardens with exposure to air. Construction began on October 2, 1672. The core fort was complete by 1695 with walls thirty feet high and fourteen feet thick.
The coquina's porous structure proved unexpectedly suited to defense. During a 1702 siege by Carolina governor James Moore, the city's 1,500 residents took shelter inside the fort and held out for fifty-two days before a Spanish relief fleet from Cuba arrived. English cannonballs reportedly sank into the soft coquina walls without shattering them. The Castillo was attacked repeatedly over the following century and never fell to direct assault. Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris; Britain returned it to Spain in 1783; Spain ceded it to the United States in 1821.
Under American rule, the fort was renamed Fort Marion. Its longest American use was not as an active defense installation but as a federal prison. Between 1875 and 1887, Plains Indian warriors captured during the Red River War and Apache prisoners including the family of Geronimo were held at Fort Marion. The forced incarceration of Native peoples at the Castillo is a difficult chapter that the National Park Service interprets with archival respect, in consultation with affiliated tribal nations including the Comanche Nation, the Kiowa Tribe, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and the Fort Sill Apache Tribe. Several prisoners died in captivity and are buried in St. Augustine.
The fort was decommissioned by the U.S. Army in 1900. It was designated a National Monument in 1924 under the Antiquities Act and transferred to the National Park Service in 1933. It was redesignated Castillo de San Marcos in 1942.
Sources
The Castillo's paranormal accounts cluster in three areas: the upper gun deck, the powder magazine, and the casemates that served as both barracks and prison cells. The recurring reports are well-documented enough that the National Park Service acknowledges them in seasonal evening programming, while the official daytime interpretive material focuses on the documented military and architectural history.
The most-cited account concerns a married couple from the Spanish period — Colonel Garcia Marti and his wife Dolores, names that appear in St. Augustine ghost-tour literature but are not securely identified in primary archival sources. Local tradition holds that Marti discovered his wife in an affair and walled them both into a small chamber in the casemate level. The 1833 discovery of two skeletons during structural work on the fort is sometimes cited as physical evidence; National Park Service interpretation treats the skeletons-in-the-wall narrative as folkloric. Visitors continue to report the smell of an unidentified floral perfume — described variously as jasmine or gardenia — concentrated in the casemate corridors.
The powder magazine generates consistent cold-spot reports, attributed in regional folklore to the long history of explosives storage and the accidental deaths it produced. The upper gun deck draws accounts of phantom sentries seen in 18th-century Spanish military dress at the angle bastions — accounts collected by St. Augustine ghost-tour operators across decades.
The prison-era period of the late 19th century, when Native American prisoners were held in the casemates, is a more sensitive layer of the property's paranormal narrative. We do not narrate sacred-site beliefs on behalf of the affiliated tribes. The National Park Service presents this chapter of the fort's history with the involvement of tribal cultural offices, and we follow that interpretive framing here.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk the 17th-century star-shaped fortress on Matanzas Bay, built of locally quarried coquina — a soft seashell limestone whose porous structure absorbed cannonballs rather than shattering. The Castillo never fell in battle and changed flags six times. Cannon firing demonstrations and ranger talks occur on weekends.
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This St. Augustine tour includes Castillo de San Marcos on its route.
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