The Historic St. Augustine Seawall

St. Augustine's history has been shaped by the sea since its founding in 1565, as colonial explorers, pirates, and seafaring merchants entered Matanzas Bay, now known as America's Oldest Seaport. The historic seawall became an integral part of the city as both a coquina barrier against rough waters and a promenade for strolls and social gatherings. The Spanish built the first seawall between the Castillo de San Marcos and the Plaza from 1695 to 1705, and it lasted more than a century. After Florida became a territory of the United States in 1821, the wall had deteriorated considerably, and in the 1830s and 1840s graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point built a new seawall south from the Castillo to what is now the Florida National Guard Headquarters. This Territorial Period wall, about seven feet high, was made of coquina laid in ashlar stonework, topped with granite, and supported by a massive coquina foundation, reflecting durable nineteenth-century engineering even as time, tides, and storms battered it. In 2001 Tropical Storm Gabrielle caused part of the wall to collapse, and in 2008 Tropical Storm Fay brought considerable flooding. In 2012 the City of St. Augustine began building a new seawall twelve feet into the water from the old wall to protect the historic structure and the surrounding waterfront neighborhood, using concrete and reinforced steel and filling and paving the space between the walls so the waterfront could again serve as a promenade with a walking path, streetlights, and landscaping. Funded in part through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the 6.7 million dollar project followed more than a decade of research, advocacy, public input, and sustained effort, and after its July 2013 completion the area around the seawall was to be better protected from storms and Category 1 hurricanes.

St. Augustine, Florida · United States