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.
Tourism in St. Augustine began when Henry Morrison Flagler, a millionaire and co-founder of Standard Oil, built the Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. Flagler visited St. Augustine while honeymooning with his second wife and fell in love with the area's shore and the balmy winter climate. Wealthy northerners were just beginning to discover this wonderful winter climate and Flagler and his wife were surprised at the lack of hotels so he decided to build a new one. Flagler stated his hardest problem was deciding on the design of a new "modern" hotel in keeping with the "oldest city" in the US.