St. Augustine, FL –The St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum welcomed a Cultural Heritage team from Spain on Thursday, April 25 at the nonprofit Museum.
Honored guests from Spain included Carlos Leon Amores, Independent consultant for the ministery General Subdirectorate of Historical Heritage of the Ministry of Culture for the Nation of Spain; Manuel de la Cruz from Malaga, Spain and Francisco Sanchez-Guitard of Edriel Intelligence. Sanchez-Guitard is also a member of a Spanish boatbuilding family.
The City of St. Augustine officials were present at the event, with Vice Mayor Leanna Freeman presenting gold coins with the City seal to the Spanish team. Commissioner John Valdes attended as well as City Manager, John Regan. Irving Kass of the St. George Inn kicked off the entire event as the Museum’s Board Treasurer presenting a copy of the PBS video of the story of St. Augustine from the University of Florida Historic St. Augustine.
Sanchez-Guitard has a vision shared by the Museum – to make the St. Augustine area a maritime hub of learning, connecting the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum to the Fountain of Youth, the settlement site of Pedro Menendez de Aviles, and scholars worldwide. This work is echoed by historian Dr. Michael Francis in his La Florida project, revealing Florida history through a digital archive of Spanish heritage in the Americas. Francis and his students are chronicling the lives and culture of those that traveled with Menendez. Please see www.laflorida.org for more information.
Carlos Leon Amores has released the first inventory of Spanish shipwrecks in America (between 1492 and 1898) with more than 600 Spanish shipwrecks on the list. The catalog of Spanish Cultural Heritage is part of the National Plan for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage developed by Spain, under the principles of the UNESCO convention and funded in part through a partnership with NOAA. Amores’ list does not yet include shipwrecks in the First Coast region. The St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum’s research arm, the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, seeks to become the first archaeological nonprofit to help with this important work and to add the nation’s oldest port to this international database.
“Our Museum’s shared objective with scholars from all over the world is not so much to raise these ships from the ocean floor, but to preserve the information that they hold and to protect them from looting and pillaging, said Kathy Fleming, Executive Director of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum.
“Instead we seek to tell their hidden stories, and reveal our worldwide connections to each other.”
For more details about the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum, visit staugustinelighthouse.org or call 904-829-0745. Stay updated on social media at facebook.com/staugustinelighthouse, Instagram.com/stauglighthouse, and twitter.com/firstlighthouse