They arrived with cannons and guns, and quickly built a fort on the coast of this vast, uncharted territory to ward off native people and French settlers. But after 21 years, Spain’s northernmost settlement on the east coast of North America was abandoned , and stood hidden for the next four centuries.

Archaeologists announced on Tuesday that they have found the Spanish fort of San Marcos on Parris Island, South Carolina, under what is now a golf course at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

Using radar and ground-penetrating sensors, researchers from the University of Georgia were able to measure magnetic fields and and map the settlement that had once been called Santa Elena, the capital of Spanish Florida.



Santa Elena was founded in 1566 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the conquistador who earned himself the title of Florida’s governor the year before, when he founded the settlement of St Augustine. Menéndez carried the brutal politics of Europe to the Americas: that same year he ordered the massacre of more than 200 French settlers who would not renounce their Protestant sect for Catholicism.

Leery of French ambitions on the coast, he founded Santa Elena to the north – near an abandoned settlement of French Huguenots who had mutinied a few years earlier. The Spanish also struggled with food shortages and disease, and had hostile relations with the local Orista and Guale people. By 1576 the tribes managed to sack the town and force the Spanish out completely, only for the conquistadors to return the next year with new settlers, soldiers and material for a new fort of San Marcos.

Archaeologists have now been able to map the site for the first time, in research to be published this week in the Journal of Archaeology Science Reports.

“Menéndez didn’t leave us with a map of Santa Elena, so remote sensing is allowing us to create a town plan,” said University of South Carolina archaeologist Chester DePratter. The 15-acre colony had not only houses, but also a church, courts, shops, taverns and structures that were probably farms and wells, the researchers found – though without excavation they cannot yet tell which outlines were which buildings.

DePratter had excavated at the site several times over 23 years in search of the fort. “The trenches we dug in 1998 missed by about 20ft,” he told the Guardian. “We never had an opportunity to figure out the layout of the whole town before,” he added. “We’re hoping we can see an additional fort beyond what we’ve located, streets, buildings, wells that they’ve dug.”

Anthropologist Victor Thompson, of the University of Georgia, said that the new technology had provided “an unprecedented view of the 16th-century landscape”.

Thompson said that the team used ground-penetrating radar, a resistance meter and a gradiometer, which he called “sort of a metal detector on steroids”.

Colonial documents and the new research also provide a more detailed image of the fort itself, a wooden structure with a barracks, storerooms and a triangular gun platform where 11 cannons could be mounted, the largest weighing more than 5,400 pounds.

At its height, Santa Elena had around 400 settlers, was the capital of Florida and the Spanish were able to devastate the Guale and Orista people – and capture any French people hiding among them. DePatter said that Menéndez had high hopes for the city – but he died in 1571, when he was called back to Spain by King Philip II. One of Menéndez’s sons-in-law took over, and quickly alienated the local tribes.

“If Pedro Menéndez had survived it’s likely the history of the colony would’ve been different,” DePratter said, “because he had good relations with the tribes.”

But by 1587 the Spanish faced a new threat, the English, who had sent Sir Walter Raleigh to settle on Roanoke Island to the north and Sir Francis Drake to raid Spanish settlements to the east and south.

The Spanish crown decided to consolidate – Santa Elena was abandoned for the larger fortress at St Augustine. The northern east coast was left to the British, and the remains of Spanish settlements left to be buried by time and soil.

“This work will allow us to tell the story of the land that would eventually become the United States,” Thompson said. “Santa Elena is an important part of this history that lends insight into how colonial powers in Europe vied for control over this corner of the New World.”