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El Camino Real (The Royal Road) is the name (rough English translation: The King's Highway) that the Spanish gave to a trail they cleared in the 1680s of a route, mostly over the traditional trails of Native Americans, from St. Augustine westward through the Spanish mission provinces in north Florida to the Mission San Luis de Apalachee in present-day Tallahassee. Before this time, transpeninsular traffic in La Florida between the western mission settle|Apalachee Province was the most populous and productive of the mission provinces in Florida, supplying laborers and surplus maize to the settlement in St. Augustine. Agricultural commodities produced in Apalachee were carried by ship around the southern end of Florida to St. Augustine, and by canoes across the Gulf of Mexico and southward on the coast to the mouth of the Suwanee River, then upriver to a location on the Santa Fe River. There they were loaded onto pack animals or the backs of Indian burderners (porters) for the remainder of the overland trip.[1] The semi-annual draft of some 200 laborers from Apalachee to St. Augustine walked along the trails, carrying sacks of maize for their sustenance while in St. Augustine, Provisions and funds from the real situado were sent on the same route in reverse.[2]


The land route had at least two alternatives in the first half of the 17th Century, and the eastern part changed a couple of times.

In 1673, the Franciscan Friar Juan Moreno suggested to the Queen Regent Mariana of Spain that the situado, or annual subsidy transferred from the royal treasury of New Spain,[3] should be transported overland from Vera Cruz in Mexico to Apalachee, and from there to St. Augustine. His suggestion was disregarded, since the route he proposed went through the territories of unchristianized Indians who were not always on friendly terms with the Spanish, while the situado, in the form of silver coins,[4] would have to be carried by burderners across the swamps, forests, and sizable bays and rivers of the Gulf of Mexico coast, which barred the passage of wagons or royal mule trains.[2]

According to "El Camino Real"[5], published by the Florida Division of Historical Resources: "In the 1680s, Florida Governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada contracted the services of military engineer Enrique Primo de Rivera to build a formal road widen the trail across north Florida to make it that was suitable for oxcarts. Although the project was never finished,[2] people and goods continued to flow to and from the capital at St. Augustine, along the main corridor known as the Camino Real."

It could be said that the Spanish had an incomplete "trail" that very loosely connected the province of La Florida in the east to the Spanish settlements in Alta California in the west, through what historians call the Spanish borderlands, but it is a gross exaggeration to describe such a discontinuous pathway, the part on the Gulf of Mexico being merely Indian foot trails running along ridges, interrupted by large bodies of water and unbridged rivers with no ferries, as a "highway".

The Spanish never built an actual road south of St. Augustine. Some unreliable sources claim that they built a road to New Smyrna in 1632, but the place did not exist in 1632. The area at the time was a wilderness uninhabited by Europeans, while the colony of New Smyrna begun and named by the Scottish Dr. Andrew Turnbull was not founded until 1768.[6] The British built the King's Road from Colerain, Georgia to New Smyrna,[7] and the Spanish did use it when they reacquired Florida in 1783, but afterward they were rather lax in maintaining it.[8]

References[edit]

  1. ^ James Axtell; William R Kenan Professor of Humanities James Axtell (7 January 2011). The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast. LSU Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-8071-4226-4.
  2. ^ a b c Amy Turner Bushnell (1987). Situado and Sabana : Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida. University of Georgia Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-8203-1712-0.
  3. ^ Christine Daniels; Michael V. Kennedy (18 October 2013). Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. Routledge. p. 38. ISBN 978-1-136-69089-1.
  4. ^ Alejandro de la Fuente (1 February 2011). Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-8078-7806-4.
  5. ^ "El Camino Real". dos.myflorida.com. Division of Historical Resources - Florida Department of State. 2017. Archived from the original on 3 June 2017. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  6. ^ Patricia C. Griffin (1991). Mullet on the Beach: The Minorcans of Florida, 1768-1788. St. Augustine Historical Society. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-8130-1074-8.
  7. ^ James W. Raab (5 November 2007). Spain, Britain and the American Revolution in Florida, 1763-1783. McFarland. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-7864-3213-4.
  8. ^ Junius Elmore Dovell (1952). Florida: Historic, Dramatic, Contemporary. Lewis Historical Publishing Company. p. 395.

The Spanish Mission Trail was a pathway through the mission provinces of northern Spanish Florida connecting St. Augustine to the Mission San Luis de Apalachee in present-day Tallahassee. The route has also been called El Camino Real (the Royal Road, or King's Highway) and the Old Spanish Trail. The eastern part of the route mapped by Joseph Purcell across northern Florida in 1778 probably was the Mission Trail and the eastern part of the Bellamy Road built after Florida became an American territory in 1821 followed the route of the Mission Trail​ in many places.

The map above shows el Camino Real, or the Mission Trail, as a fairly direct road leading from St. Augustine to the vicinity of Tallahassee, with a number of missions on or close to the road. This represents the Mission Trail​ in its prime, during the last 40 years of the 17th Century. The route of the foot trail, which is all it was until very late in its history, changed several times, as did the location of many of the missions.

The missions were vital to the survival of St. Augustine. Florida was a poor colony, producing virtually nothing of value to Spain. St. Augustine's value to Spain was in deterring other European powers from establishing a base in the area, which would threaten the Spanish treasure fleets that sailed up the Gulf Stream every year. While the Spanish Crown provided a yearly subsidy, the situado, from the treasury of New Spain to support the colony, the Spanish in Florida were dependent on Indian labor for raising corn near St. Augustine, and on surplus corn brought in from the missions.

The government in St. Augustine required about 300 unmarried men of the lower classes in mission villages, primarily from Apalachee Province, to travel to St. Augustine every year to work in the fields and on other projects. Those men were also required to bring with them the corn needed for their own use while in St. Augustine, plus surplus corn for the city. They bore sacks of corn on their backs as they traveled by foot over the Mission Trail​. The only alternatives to traveling on foot via the trail was by ship between St. Augustine and San Marcos, a port on the Gulf Coast south of Apalachee, or by small boat from San Marcos along the Gulf Coast and up the Suwanee and Santa Fe rivers to a point close to where the trail crossed the Santa Fe. The all-water route was long (twice as long as the trip from either port to Havana) and dangerous. The Suwanee River route still left about half of the trip to be completed over the foot trail, and was not suitable for carrying large numbers of drafted laborers.

The easternmost portion of the Mission Trail​ ran from St. Augustine to a village on the St. Johns River which provided a ferry service. The earliest ferry village was Tocoi, due west of St. Augustine. By 1616 Tocoi had been abandoned. A new mission village, San Diego de Helaca (also known as Elaca or Laca; as with other Indian place names, the spelling varied in different Spanish sources) was established near the site of Picolata, north of Tocoi. The Spanish were anxious to maintain ferry services across major rivers, and the men of ferry villages were exempt from the drafts for labor in St. Augustine. Nevertheless, the Spanish had trouble keeping Helaca populated. The iinitial inhabitants had been moved in from other villages. Those inhabitants fled the village repeatedly, and had to be chased down and returned to the town by Spanish troops. Later, the mission of San Diego was moved to a new location called Salamototo, north of Helaca. Salamototo has been identified with a recently found archaeological site in the community of Switzerland.

The landing on the western side of the St. Johns was at San Francisco de Pupo (also known as Popo, Pope, Popa or Poppa, and later as Fort Pupo). Prior to 1656 the middle portion of the Mission Trail was split into parallel routes. The southern route passed from Pupo southwest into Alachua County, then crossed the Santa Fe River at the Natural Bridge (O'Leno State Park), and the Suwannee River at Charles Spring near Luraville in Suwannee County. The northern route was north of the Santa Fe River and paralleled the southern route, crossing the Suwannee River near where the Alapaha River joins the Suwanee. The routes merged in Madison County.

Most of the towns in the Western Timucua provinces rebelled against the Spanish in 1656. It was not a particularly bloody rebellion; the Timucuas killed four Spaniards, a Mexican Indian and two African slaves. and the Spanish hanged seven chiefs after the rebellion collapsed. The population in all of the Timucua missions had been declining, often requiring moving Indians to towns on the Mission Trail to keep them in operation as way stations. The execution of the seven rebellious chiefs, and the sentencing of other chiefs to hard labor, disrupted the governance of many mission towns. The Spanish abandoned the northern branch of the trail, relocated several towns to place them directly on the southern branch of the trail at about a day's travel apart, and moved the populations of other towns located north of the southern branch to repopulate the towns along the trail. From this time on there was a single route for the Mission Trail across Florida. The Mission Trail remained a footpath (pack animals were in short supply in Florida, and were rarely used on the trail) for another thirty years. In the 1680s the Spanish attempted to make the Mission Trail passable for oxcarts. The road was widened from Mission San Luis de Apalachee to Mission San Francisco de Potano (northwest of present-day Gainesville) before the project was abandoned.

Late in the 17th Century Indians living to the north of Spanish Florida, with the encouragement and aid of the English in the Province of Carolina, began raiding Spanish mission towns in Florida. After the start of Queen_Anne's_War in 1702, the raids intensified, culminating in the Apalachee massacre in 1704. The Spanish then abandoned the Apalachee and Timucua missions, evacuating the surviving Indians to villages near St. Augustine.

The Spanish tried to maintain some military presence across Florida after 1704, including a small fort at San Marcos. A 1750 map shows a trail from St. Augustine that seems to follow the Mission Trail until it approaches the Suwannee, but then heads straight to San Marcos rather than into the old Apalachee Province. The trail proceeds further along the coast to a point near the mouth of the Apalachicola River, where a note indicates there was a Spanish fort built in 1719. This map does not show any trail from eastern Florida  to Pensacola.

There is a legend that el Camino Real extended past the Apalachee Province to Pensacola, and beyond to Texas and California, and that it was used by Spanish couriers between Florida and Texas. The legend was used to promote the Old Spanish Trail Highway, between San Diego, California and St. Augustine, Florida, built in the 1920s. A more obscure legend claims that a branch of el Camino Real ran from Vera Cruz, Mexico along the Gulf Coast to connect to the main route in Texas.

These is no basis for the legend. Before 1698, there was no Spanish presence on the Gulf Coast between the Apalachicola River and what is now northern Mexico. The presence of hostile tribes, swamps and wide rivers deterred the Spanish from attempting overland travel along the Gulf Coast. The settlement of Pensacola in 1698 extended the Spanish presence westward, but the French settlements in Louisiana starting the next year blocked Spanish expansion. The destruction of the Spanish missions along the Mission Trail​ in Florida within six years after Pensacola was founded meant that there was no chance to develop a route between the Apalachee Province and Pensacola.

Boyd, Mark F. "A Map of the Road from Pensacola to St. Augustine, 1778." The Florida Historical Quarterly. Vol. 17. No. 1. July, 1938

Bushnell, Amy Turner. Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida.

Hann, John H. A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions.

https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00022033/00001/1jps://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00022033/00001/1j

https://web.archive.org/web/20150722005707/https://www.tallahasseemagazine.com/September-October-2009/Following-Ancient-Footsteps/index.php?cparticle=2&siarticle=1#artanc

https://www.academia.edu/2096962/Missions_of_the_Camino_Real_Timucua_and_the_Colonial_System_of_Spanish_Florida

https://dos.fl.gov/historical/explore/el-camino-real/

Milanich, Jerald T. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe

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