Fort Caroline National Memorial Entrance

Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve Visitor Center

The visitor center center located adjacent to the fort serves as the main center for the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, a 46,000 acre preserve of which the Fort is only a small part...

It seemed almost every tree here was draped in a thick blanket of spanish moss...

Visitor Center

The visitor center had a fascinating collection of artifacts...fascinating due to the fact that they come from such an unfamiliar era to me...

Fort Access Trail

The fort itself is a short walk through the woods from the visitor center...

Spanish moss seemed to be almost dripping down from the massive arms of this overhanging live oak...

Timucuan Hut

On the way to the fort the trail passes a reconstruction of a small native hut representative of what would have been found in the region at the time of the forts existence...

Fort de la Caroline

Approaching Fort de la Caroline...

Fort de la Caroline

Shaped like a triangle, the main arched entrance to the fort is along the fort's earthen, southeastern, wall...

Main Entrance

The reconstructed fort has been built based upon a sketch of Fort de la Caroline from the period...

Main Entrance

The high arched gateway to the fort...

Southeastern Wall

A replica period cannon guards the approaches to the entrance of the fort...

Southwestern Wall

The French Fleur-de-Lis flies above the fort's other landward wall. The shallow moat surrounding the fort can also be seen...

Fort de la Caroline Interior

Grassy berms allow access to the fort's three bastions, where cannon would have been placed...

Palisade Wall

The seaward wall of the fort was wooden, for reasons unexplained to me. I kind of gave the fort an unfinished feeling...

Fort de la Caroline Interior

Though today's reconstructed fort is quite empty inside at the time there would have been a small barracks and/or a number of huts. Some 200-or-so soldiers would have garrisoned the fort at the time...

Palisade Wall

Looking northwest along the palisade wall with the St. Johns River to the right...

Northwest Bastion

Looking across the interior of the fort from the northwest bastion. The trellis-type structure in the center contains a plaque in honor of the French settlers who first founded Fort de la Caroline...

Palisade Wall

The interior of the palisade wall. By the looks of the original sketch, the poles along it were actually attached to the wall itself with wooden braces and cross-beams, making it much more robust...

Looking 400 Years into the Future

The nuclear-styled towers of a neighboring power plant across the St. Johns River form an odd backdrop to the 16th Century fort...

St. Johns River

Looking downstream, this would have been the direction that French (and later, Spanish) vessels would have sailed from to reach the fort...

Fort de la Caroline Exterior

Standing outside the southwest bastion of the fort. The moat, like most forts in this region, is fed by a short canal which could be opened to flood it when necessary. Unfortunately, these small moats couldn't protect the fort's defenders from the Spanish attack of 1565.