I really liked St. Augustine. It’s America’s oldest city and this rich history, plus outdoor activities and great local food blend very nicely to create a fun family destination in Florida that’s about more than just the beach.
Consider a typical vacation day:
In the morning, you can take a tour of a Colonial Quarter that predates both Plymouth and Jamestown. You can stay in the quarter and enjoy local seafood and ice pops for lunch, then walk a few blocks and be surrounded by 19th-century Gilded- Age architecture.
Or, you can see some alligators, go to the beach and enjoy local seafood at one of the restaurants along A1A Beach Blvd, which runs parallel to St. Augustine Beach.
Here are some of the best things to do with kids in St. Augustine that give you the opportunity to appreciate its many sides, plus tips for making the most of your visit with kids and what age groups are ideal for each activity.
St. Augustine Family Hotels
Central St. Augustine has plenty of family-friendly hotels and vacation rentals that are both roomy and charming.
I stayed at the Bayfront Inn, which has the dual advantage of good rates and a location in the Historic District, directly across from the marina where several tour boats dock.
It has a small pool on the parking lot side of the property, and a deck that offers a nice place to have morning coffee with a bay view.
The breakfast is fine, and they leave out jars of cookies or muffins in the afternoon, which is nice when traveling with kids, who always need an afternoon snack. The rooms are a standard size.
It’s a motel with outdoor corridors, which I usually avoid if I can. But it’s set back from the street and the area is quiet at night, so it turned out to be fine.
With its great location—I could walk to anything I wanted to do in town—and affordable rates, the Bayfront offers good value for families.
If you want to be based at the beach, instead of in town, you’ll find plenty of familiar, family-friendly brands along St. Augustine Beach.
The Embassy Suites has a large pool and beachfront, plus bicycles to borrow. It has a Starbucks, an onsite restaurant and a poolside bar. It offers complimentary drinks and snacks every afternoon.
Its rates are higher than other hotels nearby. But with its extra amenities and suite-style rooms it offers more of a resort experience while still being close to town.
Read more:
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• Take this Central Florida Road Trip With Kids
• This article is now featured on GPSmyCity. To download it or offline reading or create a self-guided walking tour, go to Walking Tours and Articles in St. Augustine. Or read it in the app.
19 Things To Do With Kids In St. Augustine On & Off The Beach
Discover the City’s Past
• St. Augustine predates Jamestown by some 40 years. But it was a Spanish colony rather than a British one. So it’s often overlooked when we study Colonial America in school.
No worries. This city gives you lots of opportunities to discover its history in kid-friendly ways.
1. Explore The Colonial Fort
Start at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. This national park site, known locally as simply the Fort, is probably the city’s most famous attraction.
Founded in the late 17th century by Spanish military forces, the two-story, squarish structure sits at the edge of Matanzas Bay.
It’s built with a local concrete called coquina, made from limestone that’s full of tiny seashells. When it hardens, it’s nearly indestructible. Locals credit this with the fact that the fort has never been captured by an attacking army.
It’s a National Historic Site. Kids should be sure to pick up their junior ranger books to get more interactivity out of their visit. And ask for a schedule of the talks and demonstrations that rangers and volunteers give in the inside courtyard on most days.
On the day I was there they were talking about colonial Spanish and British uniforms. To the kids’ delight, they were passing around vials of the hard-shelled cochineal bugs that were used to make red dye.
Give your family an hour to see the fort and take in its views of the city and the bay. Allow for more time if you catch more than one of the talks or demonstrations.
Best for: The talks are designed to appeal to school-age kids and tweens, but teens with an appreciation for history can enjoy them, too.
2. Tour the Colonial Quarter
The Colonial Quarter is a living history museum where costumed interpreters mingle with visitors amid the colonial homes, shops and dirt streets. See a blacksmith plying his trade or tour houses that were homes to some of the city’s oldest residents.
The day I visited was fairly quiet. But the volunteer who led the tour explained to me that his family has been in St. Augustine since the Spanish first arrives.
He was able to explain how the owners are on particular house had changed and expanded it over. He knew the house well because it had belonged to his grandmother and he’s spent time there as a child. History doesn’t get more hands-on than that.
Best for: Colonial Quarter School-age kids through early tweens. You’ll find things that younger kids can appreciate, too.
3. Lunch Break at a Colonial Quarter restaurant
The Colonial Quarter owns three restaurants and an outdoor concert venue that are all accessible from either inside the quarter or from St. George Street. The restaurants are all casual and family-friendly with kids’ menus. Eating at them supports the quarter.
I have lunch at Taberna De Caballo, which has a lovely shaded patio and pan-Latino menu. You’ll find some tasty healthy options. But the friend I was dining with went with the impressive burger. I enjoyed a classic Cubano sandwich. Kids can order a quesadilla, fried fish or dirty rice.
The Bull & Crown is a British-style pub while the St. Augustine Seafood Company offers up local seafood alongside signs that tell you a bit about the history of the local shrimp industry. The pub’s food is a bit heavier than the other two options, but you can’t go wrong with any of them.
Nearby, The Hyppo makes fresh-fruit ice pops in creative flavors like hibiscus pear, blueberry-cinnamon and pumpkin latte. I was drawn in by the promise of a dragon-fruit pop, but wound up with a peach-ginger-bourbon one that was very refreshing after exploring the city in the autumn heat.
4. Stroll Around the Historic District
The historic district is one of a handful of real, living neighborhoods in U.S. cities that transport you to someplace exotic without you needing your passport.
You’ll see brightly colored wood-frame, stone and Victorian buildings from the city’s many periods of history.
Look for indentations about the size of a large grapefruit in the whitewashed stone walls when you explore some of the older, narrower streets. They mark spots where cannonballs hit but couldn’t penetrate the coquina foundations the Spanish built.
I did a lot of my dining and shopping here. The district has a different feel during the day than at night. I enjoyed experiencing both times of day.
Make sure to pop into the Heritage Walk collection of indoor shops. The shops change from time to time, but look for local clothes and jewelry, and quirky specialty items, like soap made from beer.
Best for: Everyone in your family will find something that they enjoy in this little neighborhood.
Tip: Like all of Florida, St. Augustine is H-O-T in the summer. Plan your sightseeing for early morning if you’re visiting then.
Better year, visit during one of the cooler seasons. The city is idea for a fall or spring weekend getaway or a winter break destination that’s off the beaten track.
5. Tour Flagler College’s Gilded-Age Campus
St. Augustine experienced a renaissance during the Gilded Age, funded by barons of industry who were drawn by its location and historic charm. You can explore their over-the-top architectural additions to the city within a few impressive blocks.
Start at Flagler College, which has a gorgeous courtyard gracing its main building. The college is relatively young, but this main hall dates from 1888 when Henry Flagler built it as a luxury hotel. Its architecture was inspired by the city’s Spanish colonial past.
When the college is open, students give historic tours of the courtyard, quad, main building and dining hall twice a day. They aren’t long, the students are engaging, and some say the dining hall reminds them of the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
All-in-all, it’s a tour that kids can handle and well worth doing.
6. Walk Through the Splended Gilded-Age Hotels
Next, head across the street from the college to Casa Monica, which also dates from 1888 and is still a luxury hotel. It offers a Gilded-Age interpretation of Moroccan design.
It’s well worth walking through the lobby. And keep an eye out for autos from the hotel’s antique car collection, which often hang out by the curb near the main entrance.
Catty-corner from Casa Monica is the former Alcazar Hotel. Opened in 1889, this hotel, with a motif inspired by Moorish Spain, was quite posh by not as high-end as the other two.
It was also the “fun” hotel with amenities including a movie theater, archery, tennis, a bowling alley, Turkish and Russian baths, a casino and a swimming pool.
7. Breeze Through the Lightner Museum.
The building has a small, elegantly landscaped inner courtyard. One wing of it is now the Lightner Museum of 19th century decorative art.
The collections were a bit fussy for my taste, but it’s worth exploring the museum to find remnants of the old hotel, including the Russian baths on one of the upper floors. And it’s a good indoor stop when you need a break from the heat or rain.
Best for: Teens with an appreciation of historic glass, clothing and furniture.
8. Lunch Break: A Restaurant in a Swimming Pool
The Alcazar’s swimming pool was the largest indoor pool ever built when the hotel opened. Now, the pool houses the Café Alcazar, opened most days for lunch or afternoon snacks from 11:00-3:00.
Kids will appreciate the idea of eating lunch at the bottom of a swimming pool. If you think your kids can handle a slightly posh lunch spot, make sure to try it. You can also see the pool area from the museum’s third-floor balcony, too.
Revel in the City’s Quirky Side
9. Ahoy! Arrrrr’nt You Going to the Pirate Museum?
I expected the Pirate & Treasure Museum to be really cheesy and thought I’d spend ten minutes cruising through. But it was one of my favorite activities.
The museum is just hoky enough to make a visit entertaining, but it also deals seriously with the history of piracy, particularly around the Florida coast and the Caribbean.
It sets out to clear up a lot of the false mythology that exists about pirate culture, particularly the inaccuracies cultivated by Hollywood.
It also tells the stories of some of the most notorious pirates—men and women—to illustrate that this was a life that was both rougher and more structured than you would imagine. Very few well-known pirates got to retire peacefully with their booty.
Ask for a scavenger hunt at the ticket counter. If you find everything, you get to choose a “gem” or “gold” coin from the treasure chest.
Best for: This is an easy indoor activity to do with Tweens and teens. Use discretion with kids, who might find the history boring and some of the interactive bits scary. Parents will appreciate it more than you expect to.
10. Meet St. Augustine’s Ghosts
I took a ghost tour with Ghosts & Gravestones. It was the first time I’d taken a trolley-based ghost tour, and I was concerned we wouldn’t see much just riding on the trolley. But we got off the trolley to visit a haunted cemetery, Potters Wax Museum inside the Old Drugstore, and the Old Jail.
And having the trolley is handy if it’s very hot or raining, or you have younger children who’ll get bored with a lot of walking.
You want eerie? Walk through a wax museum at night. It was plenty spooky, and that was before the “ghosts” showed up to tell us about one of the grimmer episodes in St. Augustine’s past. At the jail, another “ghost” popped up to lock us in jail while he explained that he didn’t do it.
Best for: This is a fairly kid-friendly ghost tour. They’ll like the wax museum stop. If they are scared very easily, they might want to skip going inside the jail.
Tip: You can visit the Old Drugstore and tour the Old Jail on your own, in daylight, if you prefer.
The jail is a pleasant, whitewashed and gabled Victorian building from the outside. But tour guides delight in giving visitors a vivid explanation of incarcerated life in the late 19th century, which is fairly grim. There are several tours a day.
Best for: Tweens and teens.
11. Visit the Original Ripley’s Odditorium
I decided to visit this city’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium because it’s the original, founded by Robert Ripley’s children. It was also the set for the 1980s Ripley’s TV show hosted by Jack Palance.
This museum is housed in Castle Warden, yet another Moorish-style gilded-age mansion, with a haunted history, which also makes it worth a visit. Be sure to look up at the ceiling in the atrium that features space oddities.
Author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling) turned the mansion into a hotel, where Robert Ripley was a guest. He liked it so much he tried unsuccessfully to buy it. A decade later the hotel’s fortunes had turned and his heirs succeeded in buying it.
Most of the oddities are mild by today’s standards, like a two-headed cow, optical illusions, impossibly tiny art. There is a section on contortionists, some shrunken heads and a Fiji mermaid. It’s easy enough to breeze through any rooms you find icky.
There are some interactive elements that are fun, such as using a touchscreen to make your own odd animal hybrid or a mirror that puts masks over your face.
Best for: It’s another easy indoor activity. Kids from 7YO or 8YO through teens will like it, especially the interactive stuff. Very young children most likely won’t know what to make of it.
Try Some All-Ages and Adults-Only Local Treats
12. Take a Tour and Tipple at St. Augustine Distillery
17. The basic tour I took at the St. Augustine Distillery, is now self-guided. You walk through the fermenting and distilling rooms, see some of the barrels used for aging the bourbon and rum, and learn some of the unique things this distiller does with its spirits.
It was guided when I took it, and it almost certainly loses something when you go on your own. On the other hand, the DIY tour is free, and you can go at a pace that works for your kids.
A tour still includes a visit to the tasting room, where you get to sample four “signature” cocktails that combine the house liquors with pre-made mixers that they just happen to sell. The drinks were surprisingly good and tasted more freshly made than you would expect from a bottled mixer.
In the souvenir shop you can sample the company’s rum, vodka, gins and bourbons straight-up. My favorites were the bourbons, which are well-aged, and the rum, which is made with molasses and sugar cane, which gave it added depth.
They use some different botanicals than are typically found in gin and the ones I tried tasted less junipery than is usual. I’m not a gin fan and I thought they were okay.
13. Savor Local Chocolate at Whetstone’s Store
18. The Whetstone Chocolate Store offers a “tasting tour” that begins with a short movie on the store’s history, followed by a fudge sample. Then you learn where cacao comes from and how it’s processed into chocolate while the guide hands out samples of the basic milk, dark and white chocolates.
Next, it’s on to the shop floor to see how the chocolate is tempered, flavored, molded, cooled and packaged. Here you’ll get a surprise sample of the day.
After you leave the factory floor, you get to hear about all the different types of confections Whetstones makes —with more samples. And, no surprise, the tour ends in the company’s chocolate shop.
The tour is free for kids under 5YO.
Tip: The distillery and chocolate factory are conveniently located within a couple of blocks of one another. You can either placate your kids with chocolate before heading to the distillery or reward them for good behavior with chocolate afterward. But I recommend doing both; neither turn takes more than an hour, including tastings.
I spent more at Whetstone than at the distillery, but only because I took time to buy chocolate. I couldn’t put liquids in my carry-on luggage, so I didn’t linger in the distillery shop.
Best for: All ages.
14. A Kid-Friendly Way To Tour the Town
The Red Train Tours and Ripley’s both run trolley-train tours around town. They’re hop-on-hop-off and will take you past pretty much everything you want to see. They’re very similar, though the Ripley’s trains are smaller and go down some narrow Historic District streets where the Red Trains can’t fit.
It was pouring rain the day I arrived in St. Augustine so I hopped on the Ripley’s train and stayed on. I saw most of the city and heard a lot of funny anecdotes, colorful stories and bits of local history along the way. It was very entertaining and some of it was even true.
As touristy as it is, it’s worth doing when you first arrive to get yourself oriented and to get some kid-size doses of historical context for everything you’ll see during your stay.
Tip: If you want a lower-key city tour, there guided tours in e-vehicles that are capped at ten people. They can go places neither trolley can. And the guides can provide more in-depth detail and tailor their talk to the group a bit.
Things To Do Outside of Town
15. Play on St. Augustine Beaches
St. Augustine has some of the best beaches in Florida. State parks charge nominal parking fees and there are additional fees to drive on certain beaches; otherwise and you can access a lot of the sand and surf for free.
• The beach you must visit is Anastasia State Park. It offers a glimpse of what Florida once looked like with moss-draped oaks skirting a beach where hawks, eagles and ospreys make their home. Look for turtles in the brush.
The park has a playground, picnic areas, a snack bar (think burgers and ice cream), a farmers’ market on Saturday mornings and scheduled activities like guided hikes and nature walks.
An onsite outfitter rents SUPS and kayaks for exploring Anastasia’s protected cove. At the store next to the snack bar, you can rent fat-tire bikes for riding along the shore.
It’s best to try riding these bikes a little bit before low tide. The ideal sand for biking is sand that was recently wet and is now dry enough to be somewhat packed.
When I did this, I found patches that were super easy to ride and but also got bogged down in soft sand a few times. I would do this particular activity with teens, who can handle the bikes and some of the tougher pedaling.
It’s a great park for seeing birds and other wildlife, both on the beach and in the grasses around the beach. We spotted the friendly turtles in this video on the side of the road on the way in.
Tip: Near the entrance to the park, pull over and walk about 40 feet into the brush to see an old coquina quarry.
• A stretch of sand north of the city toward Jacksonville includes Ponte Vedra Beach and Recreation Area, the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve and Vilano Beach.
These beaches are a more wild and isolated than those closer to town. They have narrow shorelines hidden by dunes and accessed by boardwalks over the dunes.
Vilano Beach is known as one of the better beaches for finding shark-tooth fossils. Here’s a quick video to show you what to look for.
• St. Augustine Beach, just south of town, is the place to go for beachfront chain hotels, mini-golf and casual, inexpensive places to eat. It offers what you probably think of as a typical Florida beach experience with historic St. Augustine ten-minutes away.
16. Lunch Break Near St. Augustine Beach
I had lunch at the Sunset Grille, a very kid-friendly spot that parents will appreciate on this beach’s main road.
There’s a good kids’ menu but kids can also find items on the main menu like rice and beans, fresh fish nuggets and coconut shrimp.
Both the menu and the portions are big. It’s a good place to share a few plates, like the coconut shrimp, which had a good, fresh texture and a lively lime dipping sauce.
The Ahi Tuna appetizer, mahi tacos and any of the seafood sandwiches are a good bet, too.
You’ll see Minorcan conch chowders on a lot of menus. The chowder here is a good one, especially if you spice it up with a dash of the grille’s hot sauce, which is made with local datil peppers.
17. It’s Florida—You Have to See Some Alligators
Just south of the city is The St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park , a quintessential Florida attraction. I really expected a pond with a handful of gators, but it’s much more than that.
This little zoo has a lot of alligators, of all sizes and from all over the world. It also has other reptiles, including a crocodile that’s almost too big to frame in a photo. It has sloths, lemurs and exotic birds, too.
Bring quarters for the alligator food dispensers. Your kids will get a kick out of throwing the food in the ponds and watching the gators swarm.
The gift shop is kind of fun and worth a stop, especially if you have kids who are crazy about reptiles.
Best for: Preschoolers and young school-age kids will be very impressed by these grinning reptiles. Older school-age kids and tweens will be amused but will probably be ready to leave more quickly. Teens will mostly enjoy the opportunity to zip-line over the gators.
Plan on about 90 minutes, maybe less with older kids, maybe longer with younger ones.
Best for: All ages
18. Climb a Lighthouse
The St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum has a lot to do and definitely worth a couple of hours.
The top of the lighthouse offers great views of the town and surrounding coast. The climb up isn’t bad, and there are factoids and trivia on every landing, to give you an excuse to pause and catch your breath.
The keeper’s cottage has some period rooms from when the lighthouse last had an onsite keeper. But far more interesting is the exhibit in the basement about an 18th-century shipwreck that was discovered nearby in 2009.
The interactive exhibit explores the artifacts raised from the ship and what they say about who might have been sailing. And it shows what is involved in recovering items from a historic ship on the ocean floor. Both are interesting.
Back outside, there’s a nautical-themed playground that any kid under ten will want to spend time in. And there are some short nature trails to wander along (hats and bug spray are essential for these).
If you’re lucky, you might get to see volunteers making recreations of historic boats used in the area.
There are cottages from World War II, when the Coast Guard was active in the area. One of the WWII buildings has an archeologists’ lab with a viewing window. How interesting this is depends on what they’re doing the day you visit.
Tip: Next door to the lab there’s a small café that looked very tempting, at the very least, for a cold drink and a snack.
Best for: Where you spend the most time here will depend on your kids’ ages and your family’s interests, but I think almost anyone would find something to engage them.
Tip: St. Augustine Beach, the lighthouse and the alligator farm are within ten minutes of each other. You can easily pair the beach with either the lighthouse or the alligators.
If you to try to do all three in one day, visit the lighthouse in the morning, then head to the beach for lunch and a swim to cool off. Then see the alligators on the way back to town in the late afternoon when it’s cooling off.
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Photos by Eileen Gunn©.
*I was hosted by Florida’s Historic Coast so that I could research this post. I didn’t agree to any particular coverage in exchange. My opinions are always my own.