The Spanish Colonization of Florida
September 15, 2005 through January 15, 2006
Lobby Exhibition  

This exhibition spans nearly three hundred years of Spanish exploration, settlement, and eventual loss of Florida. It consists of several firsts, including a woodblock print depicting the earliest map of North and South America separate from the rest of the world. Exhibition highlights include one of the few first-person accounts by Hernando d' Escalante Fontaneda, describing southeast Florida’s Native Americans, and a published 1726 Spanish map, a rarity as Spaniards relied on manuscript maps rather than printed ones. The exhibition’s centerpiece is an uncommon bronze Communion wafer press, believed to be associated with a Spanish mission established in 1567 on Mound Key in southwestern Florida.

Go to online exhibition

Organized by the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in collaboration with the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and the Office of the Governor of Florida.

Pagus Hispanorum in Florida: [ St. Augustine], 1673. Copperplate engraving print. Dapper and Montanus. HMSF,1989-165-1.