Castillo de San Marcos
Did
you know there’s a hidden room in the Castillo? Well, it’s not really hidden,
it’s in plain sight, but with its entrance being just a little shaft
close to the floor, you might easily miss it. This is the original powder
magazine. It proved unsuitable for gunpowder since the room was always so damp,
and was walled up until about the 1830s. (That’s another story, and quite an
interesting one). Now it’s a rather creepy place you have to pretty much crawl
to enter, but it’s worth the effort. This is one of the oldest rooms in the
fort, dating from the 1670s and thus escaping the throes of remodeling in the 1750s.
Oh, try to ignore the legends of two lovers being chained to the wall. That’s
typical St. Augustine ghost lore, and the Castillo’s real history is way too
fascinating to bother with hyped paranormal tales :-)
Fountain of Youth
It’s
1587, and you’re a colonist in the little settlement of San Agustín, which is
only twenty-two years old. You climb up in the loft of the mission
church, and this is what you see. Thanks to the cool and enterprising folks at
the Fountain of Youth Park, we modern visitors get to see what our ancestors
saw. (Okay, not my ancestors. My ancestors were stubbornly Protestant and would
not have done very well in a place like this. Neither would they have had a
very warm reception. :-)) I can’t wait to climb up here again. The loft is
reached by a wooden staircase which is new and appears very safe, and if you
visit on a dreary, rainy day like I did, the ambiance is quite striking.
(c) 2015 St. Augustine Fridays
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