I'm finding out some fun facts today.
St. Augustine was founded by the Spanish in 1565, and is the oldest city in the present-day United States of America. The first Christian worship service held in a permanent settlement in the current United States was a Catholic Mass celebrated in St. Augustine. A few settlements were founded prior to St. Augustine but all failed, including the original Pensacola colony in West Florida, founded by Tristán de Luna y Arellano in 1559, with the area abandoned in 1561 due to hurricanes, famine and warring tribes, and Fort Caroline in what is today Jacksonville, Florida in 1564. The city was founded by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on September 8, 1565. Menéndez first sighted land on August 28, the feast day of Augustine of Hippo, and consequently named the settlement San Agustín. Martin de Arguelles was born here one year later in 1566, the first child of European ancestry to be born in what is now the United States. This came 21 years before the English settlement at Roanoke Island in Virginia Colony, and 42 years before the successful settlements of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Jamestown, Virginia. In all the territory under the jurisdiction of the United States, only settlements in Puerto Rico are older than St. Augustine, with the oldest being San Juan, founded in 1512.
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