Slave Market Square (Plaza de la Constitución Slave Market)

The open-air pavilion at the center of St. Augustine's Plaza de la Constitución was built as a public market in the early nineteenth century — for food, goods, and, as newspaper reports and city records confirm, enslaved people. Entrepreneurs later packaged that history into postcards and guidebooks; local whites pushed back hard, insisting only fish and vegetables had ever changed hands there. Both facts belong to the place. It still stands at the heart of America's oldest continuously occupied European-founded settlement, largely unannounced.