By the mid-sixteenth century, the sun literally never set on the empire of Spanish King Philip II (1556-1598). Philip’s empire spanned the Atlantic and stretched across the continents of North and South America. Early in the king’s reign, however, he felt his vast empire threatened by Frenchmen who were trading with Indians along the Carolina coast. This area was strategic because Spanish treasure ships passed off its shores, up the Gulf Stream, as they carried the wealth of the New World back to Spain.

Moreover, this area was part of Philip’s birthright, on the fringes of a vast, ill-defined, and unsettled expanse of territory known as La Florida. Philip’s viceroy in Mexico, Luis de Velasco, had an elaborate and ambitious plan to make good on Spanish claims in the region. The plan called for a three-step process to settle the coast, beginning with a settlement on the northern Gulf Coast, a second at Coosa, a fabled rich Indian chiefdom in northwest Georgia, and a third at Santa Elena, a mysterious, yet strategic, location on Port Royal Sound, South Carolina.

Velasco’s choice to carry out the elaborate plan was Tristán de Luna y Arellano, a don from an old Castilian family. The third husband of a wealthy widow, Luna had the resources necessary to undertake the venture. Related to the conquistador Hernán Cortés through marriage and to the first Mexican Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, by blood, he had the connections to do so. And having served in Mexico for three decades prior to 1559 and as second in command to Franciscan Vásquez de Coronado expedition across the American Southwest (1540-1542), he had the experience.

Departing Veracruz, Mexico on June 11, 1559, the newly appointed Governor of Florida and Santa Elena led one of the most formidable settlement expeditions in American History: an eleven-ship fleet carrying in excess of 1500 persons, more than double the number on any previous Spanish expedition to Florida and many times the combined number that the English sent to Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth. Reaching PensacolaBay on August 14, 1559, the eve of the Catholic holy day of the Assumption of Mary, Luna christened the bay “Bahía Santa María Filipina” after the Virgin Mary and King Philip II of Spain and subsequently chose a high site overlooking the bay for the location of the settlement.

Having consumed a good portion of the expedition’s food supply on a difficult two-month voyage to Pensacola, Luna’s men quickly set out to find the native populations that earlier explorers had placed in the area. But they were nowhere to be found. European diseases introduced by previous Spanish expeditions, particularly that of Hernando de Soto (1539-1542), may have decimated native populations around the bay. The expedition’s situation worsened dramatically on September 19, 1559 when a devastating hurricane ravaged the fledgling settlement and destroyed almost all food supplies aboard the ships in the bay. In the aftermath of the storm, Luna dispatched a surviving ship to Veracruz to secure emergency supplies. He also sent search parties into the interior for the same purpose. In February 1560, Luna ordered the main party to abandon the coast for the interior, settling at the Indian town of Nanipacana on the banks of the Alabama River.

Finding no native food stores at Nanipacana, Luna commissioned an expedition of 200 men to go in search of Coosa, a fabled Indian chiefdom that Soto’s men had visited years before. Leaving Nanipacana in April, the Coosa expedition found only disappointment. The largest town in Coosa had only a few hundred residents and seemingly held little prospect for feeding the main party who had abandoned Nanipacana and returned to PensacolaBay to await resupply ships. Each arriving vessel afforded soldiers and their families an opportunity to escape the wilds of Florida. As summer gave way to fall, the population of Pensacola colony dwindled. And as the colony withered, Luna’s faculties failed him. Bouts of fever and delirium, suggestive of malaria, debilitated the troubled governor.

By January 1561, Viceroy Velasco, convinced that Luna was unlikely ever to advance beyond his tenuous foothold on the GulfCoast, relieved him of his post. Angel de Villafañe succeeded him as Governor of Florida. Leaving about sixty soldiers at Pensacola, Villafañe ferried the balance of the settlement’s population to Havana where he recruited an expedition of about 100 to go in search of Santa Elena on the Carolina coast. Tormented by storms, one of which sank two of his four ships, and with no real interest in an Atlantic coast colony, Villafañe abandoned Santa Elena not long after he arrived in July 1561. By August had withdrawn the last troops from Pensacola. In September King Phillip finally put an end to a settlement attempt gone awry.

On the occasion of Pensacola’s 450th anniversary, this document rightfully focuses on the 1559 Luna expedition. However, the Spanish heritage of the city does not end there. It continues with the Spanish return to PensacolaBay in 1698. In response to the threat of other European settlements along the GulfCoast, Adres de Ariola founded “First Pensacola,” Presidio Santa Maria de Galve (1698-1719). In doing so, he carved out a tenuous foothold in an increasingly contested Gulf region.

Arriola’s successors faced ever greater threats from Spain’s European rivals. When a Frenchman ascended to the Spanish throne in 1701, the French at neighboring Mobile became useful allies but the English in Carolina became implacable enemies. In the War of Spanish Succession, known as Queen Anne’s War in North America, Britons and their Creek allies raided deep into Spanish Florida. Pensacola residents held out against the English-Creek onslaught, but fell to the previously allied French in 1719, during the War of the Quadruple Alliance.

After a brief French occupation of PensacolaBay (1719-1722), the Spanish returned in 1722, establishing Presidio Santa Rosa Pensacola (1722-1756) on the barrier island just off shore. In the years following a devastating 1752 hurricane, island residents relocated to the mainland, founding the short-lived Presidio San Miguel de Panzacola (1756-1763) in 1756, subsequently abandoning it to the English in 1763.

During the British colonial period (1763-1781), Pensacola evolved into a vibrant town and with a growing economy built around naval stores and the deer skin trade. Unwilling to rebel in support of the American cause, the British colonists soon found themselves under a Spanish flag due to the exploits of an illustrious young Louisiana governor named Bernardo de Gálvez. During the American Revolution, Gálvez assumed a leading role on a very visible stage. Spain, though reluctant to aid a group of rebels who were setting such a bad example for its own colonists to the south, allied itself with France against England in a secret treaty signed in April 1779.

When news of the alliance reached New Orleans, Bernardo de Gálvez sprang into action. Beginning in September 1779, Gálvez drove the British from the lower Mississippi River, then turned his attention on British strongholds at Mobile and Pensacola. At the head of more than 1,300 troops, Gálvez captured Mobile in March 1780. A year later he anchored a large force off Santa Rosa Island. After two months of bloody battles that resulted in almost 300 British and Spanish casualties, Gálvez captured Pensacola on May 8, 1781.

The “Battle of Pensacola,” as it came to be known, was important to the American cause in that England lost a valuable port by which it could have landed troops and supplies and protected its interests along the GulfCoast. Moreover, the victory gave the Americans leverage at the peace tables of Paris. And the Spanish got their Florida possessions back.

Returning to Pensacola in 1781, Spanish officials attempted, in vain, to hold back the tide of American influence sweeping over the region. Personified by the tough hewn frontiersmen and future U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, the American aggression that engulfed West Florida brought to a close Pensacola’s colonial period in 1821. Spain’s legacy lives on, however, in the city’s rich history, archaeology, and culture.

Archaeologists and historians continue to unearth Pensacola’s past from under the waters of PensacolaBay, from excavations on land, and from historical documents. To find exhibits highlighting Pensacola’s rich and diverse heritage, visit the T.T.WentworthMuseum, the Colonial Archaeological Trail, which now includes FortGeorge, and the Archaeology Institute at the University of West Florida. For more information, visit www.uwf.edu/archaeology and www.historicpensacola.org