Anastasia Island — The Lighthouse, the State Park, and the Whole Island Beyond the City Line

What Actually Makes Anastasia Island Different

Anastasia Island is the actual landform, and it's bigger and more fractured, governance-wise, than any single city name suggests. It runs roughly 14 miles from the St. Augustine Inlet at its north end to the Matanzas Inlet at its south end, with the Atlantic Ocean on its east side and the Matanzas River (part of the Intracoastal Waterway) separating it from the mainland to the west. A buyer searching "St. Augustine beach real estate" can land on a parcel inside any of three separate governments: the historic City of St. Augustine, whose Davis Shores and Lighthouse Park neighborhoods occupy the island's northern tip nearest the Bridge of Lions; the City of St. Augustine Beach, an independently incorporated city (its own five-member commission, its own city manager, its own City Hall) occupying the island's central third; or unincorporated St. Johns County, which governs the entire southern two-thirds of the island on its own, with no city government at all -- an area that includes Crescent Beach and Butler Beach. Each of those three governments sets its own zoning, its own short-term-rental rules, and (for the two incorporated cities) its own municipal millage rate layered onto the county's. A parcel's actual governing jurisdiction should always be confirmed before assuming any rule from one part of the island applies to another.

The island's best-known landmark, the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum, sits at that northern tip -- inside the City of St. Augustine's boundary, not St. Augustine Beach's. Its story goes back further than the current tower: the first documented watchtower on this spot dates to 1589, part of a Spanish coastal-watch network built to protect St. Augustine from enemy ships during the era the Castillo de San Marcos was under construction, and by 1737 the Spanish had replaced it with a 30-foot coquina-and-wood tower. An 1824 U.S. government lighthouse followed, making it one of the first lighthouses the American government built in Florida; erosion eventually threatened that structure, and the current black-and-white striped, 165-foot tower was built between 1871 and 1874 and first lit on October 15, 1874. It's still an active aid to navigation today, run as a private nonprofit maritime museum with a keeper's house, a boat-building shed, and 219 steps to a panoramic platform overlooking the island, Salt Run, and the Atlantic. None of that history belongs to St. Augustine Beach the city -- it belongs to the island, and specifically to the section of it outside that city's own limits.

The island's geology is a genuinely distinctive, sourced fact, not a marketing flourish: this is the type locality for the "Anastasia Formation," the geological name for the coquina limestone outcrops that run along roughly 150 miles of Florida's Atlantic coast starting here. Coquina is a porous rock made of compressed sand and ancient mollusk shells, and Spanish colonial engineers began large-scale quarrying it directly across Matanzas Bay from Anastasia Island starting in 1671 to build the Castillo de San Marcos. The rock turned out to have a rare defensive property: instead of shattering under cannon fire the way harder stone would, coquina's porous structure absorbed the impact, and cannonballs simply embedded themselves in the walls -- a real reason the fort held up under siege. The Spanish Coquina Quarries themselves, inside what is now Anastasia State Park, have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since February 23, 1972, and supplied Spanish colonial building stone for more than two centuries.

Anastasia State Park itself -- more than 1,600 acres with roughly 4 miles of protected shoreline, 139 campsites across seven campgrounds, and (as of 2026) new glamping-style Beach Bungalows -- occupies the island's north end, adjacent to but administratively separate from the City of St. Augustine Beach immediately to its south. It's a Florida DEP property, not a city or county park, and its rules, hours, and amenities are its own. On the island's opposite end, in unincorporated St. Johns County south of St. Augustine Beach's city limits, sits a very different but equally real piece of island history: Butler Beach. Frank B. Butler, an African American businessman in St. Augustine, began buying beachfront land on Anastasia Island in 1927 after growing frustrated that Black residents were barred from the era's whites-only beaches, and built a residential subdivision, casino, motel, and beach resort that became the first beach open to Black citizens between Daytona and Jacksonville. By 1948 at least eleven Black-owned businesses operated there. County officials delayed and denied Butler's requests for access roads and water service even as the resort thrived -- a real, documented civil-rights-era obstacle, not a footnote. Butler Beach later passed to the Florida Park Service and is now a St. Johns County park, open to everyone, with a preserved history walk telling that story on site.

Between those two landmark ends, the island's southern unincorporated stretch -- Crescent Beach and Butler Beach specifically -- reads as noticeably quieter than the commercial strip in St. Augustine Beach: A1A narrows to two lanes through this section, commercial development is sparser, and Crescent Beach itself is a small, unincorporated census-designated place (roughly 844-900 residents depending on the estimate) rather than a city. That's also where Hurricane Nicole's 2022 sand loss hit hardest, per county damage assessments -- a real reminder that the island's quieter, less-developed sections carry the same barrier-island storm exposure as its busier center. Whatever section of the 14-mile island a buyer is actually looking at, the real-cost and investment-outlook pages linked below dig into what that fragmented governance, that storm history, and this island's genuinely uncommon geology mean in dollars and risk.