08/10/2026
Awesome view of the first European settlements in Port Royal Sound.
📌 Charlesfort–Santa Elena Historical Complex — Parris Island, South Carolina
📍 32°18′23.88″N, 80°40′31.11″W
For most of the 20th century, archaeologists thought they'd found the French fort here. They'd actually found the Spanish one.
Hidden beneath the trees and marshes of Parris Island is one of the most remarkable early colonial sites in the country, a place where French and Spanish colonization attempts were literally built on top of each other. In 1562, French explorer Jean Ribault arrived at Port Royal Sound as part of an expedition organized by Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and left about two dozen men behind to establish Charlesfort, one of the earliest French colonial settlements in what became the United States.
The colony barely lasted a year. Ribault sailed back to Europe for supplies but got tangled up in the French Wars of Religion and never returned. At Charlesfort, supplies ran out, fire destroyed much of what remained, and the commander was killed in a mutiny. The desperate survivors built their own boat and tried crossing the Atlantic without a compass, and starvation grew so severe that they eventually killed and ate one of their own before finally being rescued near Europe.
That failure didn't end European ambitions here, though. In 1566, the Spanish established Santa Elena on the same island, which became the first capital of Spanish Florida. Over the next two decades, they built a succession of forts, San Salvador, San Felipe, and San Marcos, and at its peak, Santa Elena held roughly 60 houses and 400 to 450 residents.
One of the most fascinating twists in this story came centuries later. For most of the 1900s, this earthwork was believed to be Charlesfort. Major George Osterhout excavated it in the 1920s and concluded he'd found the French fort, and a monument was even erected there commemorating it. He'd actually found a Spanish fort. Later archaeological work showed that earthwork belonged to Fort San Marcos, while the real Charlesfort turned up slightly farther north, where archaeologists found distinctly French artifacts and overlapping defensive ditches proving the Spanish had built their first Fort San Felipe directly on top of Charlesfort's abandoned remains. Two rival colonial powers, building on essentially the same ground within just a few years of each other.
That distinction matters when looking at the LiDAR, the conspicuous earthwork historically labeled Charlesfort is actually Spanish Fort San Marcos, while Charlesfort itself sits farther north within the Fort San Felipe complex.
Santa Elena itself was abandoned once already, in 1576, after conflict with local Indigenous peoples, before the Spanish returned the following year to rebuild it. A moat was added around the later Fort San Marcos in 1586 as the Spanish braced for a possible attack by Sir Francis Drake. Then in 1587, Spain abandoned Santa Elena for good, shifting its colonial focus farther south in Florida.
Because Parris Island escaped the heavy agricultural development that destroyed so many early colonial sites along the Atlantic coast, extraordinary archaeological evidence survived underground here. Excavations from the 1970s through the 1990s finally sorted out the confusing sequence of French and Spanish forts, and even uncovered the only known early Spanish pottery kiln of its kind in the continental United States.
Today, the Charlesfort–Santa Elena archaeological district is a National Historic Landmark. More than 460 years after the first French colonists broke ground here, LiDAR still reveals the geometry of these long-vanished defenses, earthworks from a forgotten struggle between France and Spain for control of the Carolina coast, decades before Jamestown was even founded.
