Nature
Matanzas Inlet, about 14 miles south of St. Augustine on Florida’s Atlantic coast, links the ocean with the southern end of the Matanzas River and is notable as the last remaining natural, undredged inlet on that coast. Unfixed by jetties or dredging, it has shifted hundreds of yards south since the colonial era. Its name recalls the 1565 execution of French Huguenot shipwreck survivors by order of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés after the founding of St. Augustine and the fall of Fort Caroline. The inlet remained strategically important, leading the Spanish to build Fort Matanzas in 1742 to protect this vulnerable route.
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