How St. Augustine Became the First European Settlement in America

On September 8, 1565, the first permanent European settlement in the United States was founded at St. Augustine, Florida. An excerpt from the article:

"St. Augustine, Florida was founded by Spanish explorers long before Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony.
Even before Jamestown or the Plymouth Colony, the oldest permanent European settlement in what is now the United States was founded in September 1565 by a Spanish soldier named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in St. Augustine, Florida. Menéndez picked the colony’s name because he originally spotted the site on August 28, the feast day of St. Augustine.

Menéndez’s expedition wasn’t the first group of Spanish explorers who tried to start a colony in Florida, which Juan Ponce de León had claimed for Spain back in 1513. And unlike other colonizers, he wasn’t out to find gold or set up a trading network with the Native tribes.

Instead, Menéndez’s primary mission was simple: Get rid of French Huguenot colonists who were trying to usurp the Spanish claim. The previous year, the French had established an outpost at Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville. A French base in Florida posed a potential threat not just to Spanish territorial claims, but also to the Spanish treasure fleet that sailed from South America and Mexico along the Florida coast before heading across the Atlantic to Spain. Spain’s King Philip II wanted the French threat eliminated, particularly because the settlers were Protestants and to Philip, a Catholic, that made them intolerable."