Aviles Street — reputed to be the oldest street in the United States, a narrow lane of galleries, gardens, and colonial houses named for the city's founder.
Turn down Aviles Street here and slow right down, because you're walking what many call the oldest street in the United States — a slim, curving, brick-and-stone lane that was here in the first Spanish century, and that still carries the founder's own name: Avilés, for Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the man who started it all.
This is my favorite kind of St. Augustine street — quiet, shady, and human-scaled, with art galleries and little museums tucked into old coquina houses, iron balconies overhead, and courtyard gardens spilling bougainvillea over the walls. There are no big attractions shouting for your attention here; the street itself is the attraction. Look for the Spanish Military Hospital, where you can see how the wounded were treated in the seventeen hundreds, and the old colonial homes with their historical markers.
Keep strolling south down Aviles Street; a little further on stands one of the oldest houses in the whole country.
Photo: Kiran891 · CC BY-SA 4.0
