Start from 62 curated places around St. Augustine, FL, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Collage
An award-winning, white-tablecloth dinner room a block off St. George Street — eclectic globally-influenced cooking from owner-chef Mike Hyatt, with a serious wine list and a small dining room that requires reservations weeks ahead. The St. Augustine special-occasion dinner.
Catch 27
A tight Charlotte Street kitchen working only Florida-caught fish — short menu, daily-changing specials, a tucked-away outdoor patio, and a sustainability story that's actually verifiable. The seafood reservation locals send their visiting friends to.
Trails & outdoors
Anastasia State Park
A 1,600-acre barrier-island state park east of the Bridge of Lions — four miles of undeveloped Atlantic beach, a salt-marsh trail, a maritime hammock loop, and the original 17th-century coquina quarry that built the Castillo. The locals' beach and the city's best urban-park hike in one.
Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve
A 73,000-acre estuarine research reserve north of the city — over 30 miles of trails through pine flatwoods, salt marsh, and coastal hammock. Dam Trail and Old A1A Trail are the most-walked; the rest is wilderness with very few people.
Things to do
Lightner Museum
Henry Flagler's 1888 Hotel Alcazar repurposed into a Gilded-Age decorative-arts museum — four floors of Tiffany glass, mechanical music boxes, an indoor swimming pool turned cafe, and a collection that ranges from shrunken heads to salt-and-pepper shakers. The St. Augustine rainy-day plan.
St. Augustine Distillery
Inside the same 1907 ice-plant complex as Ice Plant Bar — Florida's first craft distillery, free production-floor tours, a tasting room pouring cane vodka, gin, bourbon, and rum, and a small gift shop selling locally distilled spirits. The historic-district adult afternoon.
Landmarks & sights
Castillo de San Marcos National Monument
The oldest masonry fort in the continental United States — Spanish, started in 1672, built of coquina shell-stone that absorbed cannonballs and never fell to siege. Walk the gun deck, climb the turrets, and listen for the weekend cannon firings that shake the surrounding plaza.
Flagler College
The 1888 Hotel Ponce de Leon turned working college — Henry Flagler's first Florida palace, with Tiffany stained-glass windows, mural-painted dome, and an interior atrium most of America's grandest hotels would envy. Self-guided lobby is free; the guided campus tour is the move.