While Catholicism may have seemed dead in Florida from the arrival of the English, since all the Catholic Spaniards departed for Caribbean ports, the arrival of a workforce composed of Minorcans, Italians, and Greeks in 1767 at what is now New Smyrna Beach led to the resurgence of the Catholic faith on the peninsula and, eventually, in the City of St.
In 1888, Flagler built the Hotel Ponce de León, his first in a series of luxury resorts along Florida's east coast. A masterpiece of Spanish Renaissance architecture and the first major poured-in-place concrete building in the United States is now known as Ponce de Leon Hall.