A report on St. Augustine, Florida and Spanish Florida

Florida subsequently became the first area in the continental U.S. to be permanently settled by Europeans, with the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, founded in 1565, being the oldest continuously inhabited city.

He named it La Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers).

The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what is now Georgia and Alabama.

By the early 1700s, much of La Florida was uninhabited apart from towns at St. Augustine and Pensacola.

The First Seminole War (1817-1818) -"Beginning in the 1730's, the Spaniards had given refuge to runaway slaves from the Carolinas, but as late as 1774 Negroes [did] not appear to have been living among the Florida Indians." After that latter date more runaway slaves began arriving from American plantations, especially congregating around "Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River." Free or runaways, "the Negroes among the Seminoles constituted a threat to the institution of slavery north of the Spanish border." The plantation owners, mostly from Mississippi and Georgia "knew this and constantly accused the Indians of stealing their Negroes." However, the situation was "frequently reversed" the whites were raiding into Florida and stealing black slaves belonging to the Seminoles. On December 26, 1817 "the War Department...wrote the order directing Andrew Jackson to take command in person and bring the Seminoles under control." Spain expressed outrage over General Andrew Jackson's "punitive expeditions" into Spanish Florida against the Seminoles. However, as was made clear by several local uprisings, and other forms of "border anarchy", Spain was no longer able to defend nor control the territory and eventually agreed to cede Florida to the United States per the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, with the official transfer taking place in 1821. According to the terms of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823) between the United States and Seminole Nation, the Seminoles were removed from Northern Florida to a reservation in the center of the Florida peninsula, and the United States constructed a series of forts and trading posts along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts to enforce the treaty.

The few remaining natives fled west to Pensacola and beyond or east to the vicinity of St. Augustine.

Later, in April 1783, on a visit made by Prince William of the United Kingdom (later to become King William IV) to Luis de Unzaga at his residence in the Captaincy General of Havana, they made prisoner exchange agreements and also dealt with the preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris (1783), in which the recently conquered Bahamas would be exchanged for East Florida, which would still have to conquer the city of St. Augustine, Florida in 1784 by order of Luis de Unzaga; after that, also in 1784, the Bahamas would be declared a British colony.

The Timucua may have been the first American natives to see the landing of Juan Ponce de León near St. Augustine in 1513.

The Timucua history changed after the Spanish established St. Augustine in 1565 as the capital of their province of Florida.

The Adams–Onís Treaty (Tratado de Adams-Onís) of 1819, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, the Florida Purchase Treaty, or the Florida Treaty, was a treaty between the United States and Spain in 1819 that ceded Florida to the U.S. and defined the boundary between the U.S. and New Spain.

The State of Muskogee (1799-1803) demonstrated Spain's inability to control the interior of East Florida, at least de facto; the Spanish presence had been reduced to the capital (San Agustín) and other coastal cities, while the interior belonged to the Seminole nation.

A platted town was established there in 1822, a year after the United States gained Florida from Spain; it was named after Andrew Jackson, the first military governor of the Florida Territory and seventh President of the United States.

On September 20, 1565, a Spanish force from the nearby Spanish settlement of St. Augustine attacked Fort Caroline, and killed nearly all the French soldiers defending it.

Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, the Kingdom of Spain established a number of missions throughout La Florida in order to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, to facilitate control of the area, and to prevent its colonization by other countries, in particular, England and France.

Spanish Florida originally included much of what is now the Southeastern United States, although Spain never exercised long-term effective control over more than the northern part of what is now the State of Florida from present-day St. Augustine to the area around Tallahassee, southeastern Georgia, and some coastal settlements, such as Pensacola, Florida.

East Florida (Florida Oriental) was a colony of Great Britain from 1763 to 1783 and a province of Spanish Florida from 1783 to 1821.

Deciding that the territory was too large to administer as a single unit, Britain divided Florida into two colonies separated by the Apalachicola River: East Florida with its capital in St. Augustine and West Florida with its capital in Pensacola.

The Castillo de San Marcos (Spanish for "St. Mark's Castle") is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States; it is located on the western shore of Matanzas Bay in the city of St. Augustine, Florida.

It was designed by the Spanish engineer Ignacio Daza, with construction beginning in 1672, 107 years after the city's founding by Spanish Admiral and conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, when Florida was part of the Spanish Empire.