MUSEUM & CULTURE
Villa Zorayda Museum
St. Johns County · Atlantic Coast
An 1883 house on King Street built as a scaled copy of the Alhambra, and the building that showed Flagler how to build in concrete.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Franklin W. Smith was a Boston millionaire with an idea. In 1883 he built himself a winter house in St. Augustine modeled on the twelfth-century Moorish Alhambra Palace at Granada, at roughly a tenth of the original's scale, and named it after a princess in a story by Washington Irving. More important than the shape was the method. Smith poured concrete using crushed coquina shell as the aggregate, and Henry Flagler saw it work and used the same technique on the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar hotels and on Memorial Presbyterian Church. Abraham Mussallem, a Syrian antiquities dealer, bought the villa and Smith's art collection in 1913, and his family still owns it. It went on the National Register on September 23, 1993, was renovated from 2003 and reopened as a museum in 2008. The rooms hold the Mussallem collection of antiquities and rugs. It stands at 83 King Street
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