Mission San Luis in Leon County, Florida

Photograph: Mission San Luis - Reconstructed Franciscan Church.jpg by MissionSanLuis · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Leon County attraction

Mission San Luis

Leon County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

Sixty-four acres two miles west of the Capitol, where a Spanish mission and an Apalachee town stood side by side from 1656 to 1704.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

This was the western capital of Spanish Florida. By 1675 more than fourteen hundred Apalachee and several hundred Spanish lived under its jurisdiction, and the two communities shared one plaza: the Spanish church and friary on one side, the Apalachee chief's house and council house on the other. The council house was the largest historic Indian structure known in the southeastern United States, big enough to hold between two and three thousand people. A proper fort with a palisade, parapets and a dry moat was begun in October 1702 and finished the following year. In July 1704, with English colonists and their Creek allies raiding through Apalachee, the Spanish and the Apalachee burned the fort and the entire town themselves rather than leave it standing, and walked away. Archaeologists worked the site for decades and the buildings were reconstructed from 1996 on the excavated footprints. Staff in period dress work the buildings. It was made a National Historic Landmark on October 15, 1966

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official Website ↗

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