Spanish Florida

Spanish Florida, La Florida, was the Spanish Empire's colony in south-eastern North America, claimed in 1513 and held, with a twenty-year British interruption, until 1821. Its claimed borders were never fixed and at first reached far beyond the modern state of Florida, but Spanish control rarely went much further than a few forts, missions and ranches. It was administered within the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as part of the Captaincy General of Cuba, and Spain valued it mainly as a buffer protecting its richer colonies and shipping routes.

Juan Ponce de León, then governing Puerto Rico, sighted the Florida coast on 2 April 1513 and named the land La Florida, after the Easter season (Pascua Florida) and its flowering plants. The story that he sought a fountain of youth appeared only after his death. Ponce de León was fatally wounded by a Calusa arrow in 1521, and a colony of some 600 people under Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón lasted only two months in 1526. Pánfilo de Narváez landed near Tampa Bay in 1528; only four of his men eventually reached Mexico. Hernando de Soto marched from Tampa Bay in 1539 through much of the south-east, crossing the Mississippi before dying in 1542.

French Huguenots founded Fort Caroline, near modern Jacksonville, in 1564. In response, Philip II sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded St. Augustine on 8 September 1565, the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded settlement in the continental United States. Menéndez captured Fort Caroline and ordered the execution of the French survivors of a shipwrecked fleet at a place afterwards called Matanzas. Franciscans took over the missions in 1573 and in the seventeenth century ran dozens of them among the Guale, Timucua and Apalachee, who also supplied food and forced labour. Revolts broke out among the Guale in 1597, the Apalachee in 1647 and the Timucua in 1656. Cattle ranching became the most successful enterprise. The stone Castillo de San Marcos was begun at St. Augustine in 1672.

Disease, war and slave raiding caused a catastrophic fall in the native population. From 1680 colonists from Carolina and their Native American allies attacked the missions. In 1702 James Moore burned St. Augustine, though the fort held, and in 1704 his raids destroyed most of the remaining Apalachee missions, killing or enslaving much of their population. Spain founded Pensacola in 1698 to block French expansion along the Gulf coast. A royal decree of 1693 offered freedom to enslaved people who fled to Florida from the English colonies and accepted Catholic baptism, and Fort Mose near St. Augustine became home to a free black militia. During the eighteenth century Creek and other Native American groups moved into the emptied lands and, joined by people escaping slavery, formed the Seminole.

In 1763, after the Seven Years' War, Spain handed Florida to Britain in exchange for Havana, and most of the Spanish population left for Cuba. Britain split the territory in two, as East Florida and West Florida. Spain regained both under the peace treaties of 1783 and kept the division. Border disputes with the United States followed, settled for a time by Pinckney's Treaty in 1795, but Spanish control remained thin. The United States absorbed parts of West Florida from 1810, and American raids against the Seminoles grew, culminating in Andrew Jackson's campaign of 1817–1818 in the First Seminole War.

Unable to defend the colony, Spain agreed to the Adams–Onís Treaty of 22 February 1819, which took effect on 17 July 1821 and handed Florida to the United States. The United States in turn gave up its claim to Texas and agreed to pay Spanish debts owed to American citizens, about $5 million in total. St. Augustine and Pensacola survive as cities, and two federally recognised Seminole tribes live in Florida today.

Our maps label the colony "Florida" and draw it in 1650 and 1700. The outline, about 188,000 square kilometres at its largest in 1650, lies wholly within today's United States, and is approximate.