The Fort Nobody Could Break Into

You're standing at the drawbridge of the Castillo de San Marcos, the old Spanish fort on the edge of Matanzas Bay. Look at the walls in front of you. That gray, rough stone isn't ordinary rock. Get close and you'll see it's made of ancient shells that have bonded together into rock. The Spanish called it coquina, which means "small shells." Hold on to that, because those shells are why this fort is still standing.

In 1668 an English privateer named Robert Searles raided St. Augustine, and the town was burned. The Spanish had already built nine wooden forts here, one after another, and wood had proved inadequate. The answer was masonry. A Spanish engineer named Ignacio Daza designed this star-shaped fort, and the first coquina blocks were laid in 1672. The stone was cut across the bay on Anastasia Island and ferried over. Most of the labor came from Native people from Spain's nearby missions, along with enslaved Africans and skilled workers brought from Havana. It took 23 years.

The test came in 1702. Carolina's governor, James Moore, marched south and laid siege to the town. About 1,500 residents and soldiers crowded inside these walls for two months. The English cannons fired, and something strange happened. The cannonballs didn't shatter the walls. They sank into the coquina instead.

The Castillo was attacked again in 1740, and it changed hands between four governments over the years. But it was never taken by force. Not once.

Which makes its most famous escape a story about getting out. After Florida became American in 1821, the Army renamed this place Fort Marion and used it as a prison for Native Americans, beginning with the Seminole people. Osceola, the famous Seminole war chief, was held here. In 1837, twenty Seminole prisoners slipped out through one of the narrow musket openings in the wall. A fortress built to keep armies out couldn't keep twenty determined people in.

And the ghosts? Ghost tour guides talk about the phantom watchmen, shadowy figures said to patrol the grounds. Others tell of two lovers, Dolores Martí, the young wife of a Spanish colonel, and Captain Manuel Abela of the garrison. Those are stories told by tour companies, not documented history. What is documented is stranger in its own way: 251 years of continuous military possession, until the fort was deactivated in 1933. If anything is still keeping watch up there, it's had a lot of practice.

When you're ready, walk south, then turn left onto Drawbridge, about 450 meters and seven minutes, to the Huguenot Cemetery, where St. Augustine buried those who didn't fit in the Catholic graveyards.