Photo Friday: St. Augustine, Florida

I don’t know how it took me almost 25 years to finally make it to St. Augustine, Florida. It has everything I love in a destination: history, beaches and food. In fact, it’s the oldest city in America, dating back to the landing of Ponce de Leon in 1513. The state is celebrating Viva 500, or 500 years of European settlement, and St. Augustine is ground zero for the festivities.

And while I thought my school had cornered the market for beautiful old schools, Flagler College, housed in the former Ponce de Leon Hotel, may be a close second. Oil tycoon Henry Flagler, the school’s namesake, developed dozens of hotels in the area during America’s Gilded Age and is responsible for the railroad making its way to the Keys.

Flager’s resort was established for the wealthy in 1888, where they had to pay for months at a time, even if they only wanted to stay for a week. First time architects Thomas Carrere and Thomas Hastings built the hotel in the Spanish Renaissance style to go with the area’s Spanish history.

Flagler also developed the Alcazar Hotel across the street, the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach and the famous Breakers, also in Palm Beach.

I arrived in St. Augustine from Macon, Georgia just in time to take the 2 pm tour of the school. Legacy tours run at 10 am and 2 pm daily, led by students. These tours are often sold out, even on rainy days like I experienced, so I recommend purchasing tickets ahead of time, which are $10 for adults.

I met the group in the overwhelming 80 foot rotunda where 50 or so of us were all craning our necks to get a glimpse of the murals, surrounded by carved wooden oak caryatids. The attention to detail that Flagler and his staff showed still amaze today, especially the Tiffany windows and world’s first Thomas Edison clock thanks to both men being friends of Flagler’s.

Although this was one of only a handful of Flagler’s that survived the Great Depression, the time of decadence had decidedly come to an end. During World War II, the hotel was used as a Coast Guard Training Center. In the 1960s, it was a part of the Civil Rights Movement when black students staged a sit-in and were met by police with cattle prods and dogs.

In 1968, the hotel became home to the newly-established Flagler College, a liberal arts school. There have been few expansions over the years to retain the historic integrity to the buildings. The main hotel building serves as female dormitories. There are only 2,500 students and tuition for both in-state and out-of-state students is around $15,000 per year, one of the cheapest in the country.

Students remark that going to Flagler is like going to Hogwarts and upon entering the dining hall, you can see why. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see students wandering around in robes with wands. Their colors are crimson and gold, the same colors of the Gryffindor House in the Harry Potter series.

Have you been to St. Augustine, Florida?

My stay in St. Augustine was arranged by the wonderful folks at Florida’s Historic Coast and Comfort Inn & Suites St. Augustine, but all opinions are my own.