PENTAX DSLRs: # 4 - Weekly Chronicle and Photo Album of our current two-year trip across the U.S. and Canada in a RV with our Ricoh/Pentax equipment. This week, St Augustine Florida with my Pentax K-3 and the DA 16-45mm ED-AL

Hi Photographer friends,

Today, we had a chance to visit St. Augustine for a few hours. There isn't much you can do in a few hours, but I tried to capture some of the architecture of this Oldest City in the Nation. Despite the short time we had, I believe my award winning Pentax K-3 and the DA 16-45mm helped me capture some good images of the City's Spanish architectural influence. Althought I purchases this lens a while back, I always liked this lens.

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States. Forty-two years before the English colonized Jamestown and fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Spanish established at St. Augustine this nation's first enduring settlement.

The architectural legacy of the city's past is much younger, testimony to the impermanent quality of the earliest structures and to St. Augustine's troubled history. Only the venerable Castillo de San Marcos, completed in the late seventeenth century, survived destruction of the city by invading British forces in 1702.

Vestiges of the First Spanish Colonial Period (1565-1764) remain today in St. Augustine in the form of the town plan originally laid out by Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo in the late sixteenth century and in the narrow streets and balconied houses that are identified with the architecture introduced by settlers from Spain. Throughout the modern city and within its Historic Colonial District, there remain thirty-six buildings of colonial origin and another forty that are reconstructed models of colonial buildings.

St. Augustine can boast that it contains the only urban nucleus in the United States whose street pattern and architectural ambiance reflect Spanish origins.