De Leon Springs in Volusia County is a 2nd magnitude spring with a flow of about 19 million gallons of 72° F water per day.
Tales of sacred, restorative waters existed well before the birth of Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León around 1474. Alexander the Great, for example, was said to have come across a healing “river of paradise” in the fourth century B.C., and similar legends cropped up in such disparate locations as the Canary Islands, Japan, Polynesia and England. During the Middle Ages, some Europeans even believed in the mythical king Prester John, whose kingdom allegedly contained a fountain of youth and a river of gold. “You could trace that up until today,” said Ryan K. Smith, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “People are still touting miracle cures and miracle waters.”
Spanish sources asserted that the Taino Indians of the Caribbean also spoke of a magic fountain and rejuvenating river that existed somewhere north of Cuba. These rumors conceivably reached the ears of Ponce de León, who is thought to have accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1493. After helping to brutally crush a Taino rebellion on Hispaniola in 1504, Ponce de León was granted a provincial governorship and hundreds of acres of land, where he used forced Indian labor to raise crops and livestock. In 1508 he received royal permission to colonize San Juan Bautista (now Puerto Rico). He became the island’s first governor a year later, but was soon pushed out in a power struggle with Christopher Columbus’ son Diego.
Having remained in the good graces of King Ferdinand, Ponce de León received a contract in 1512 to explore and settle an island called Bimini. Nowhere in either this contract or a follow-up contract was the Fountain of Youth mentioned. By contrast, specific instructions were given for subjugating the Indians and divvying up any gold found. Although he may have claimed to know certain “secrets,” Ponce de León likewise never brought up the fountain in his known correspondence with Ferdinand. “What Ponce is really looking for is islands that will become part of what he hopes will be a profitable new governorship,” said J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. “From everything I can gather, he was not at all interested or believed that he would find some kind of miraculous spring or lake or body of water.” At least one historian suggests that perhaps Ferdinand, who had recently married a woman 35 years his junior, told Ponce de León to keep his eye out for it. But other experts dispute this.
Either way, Ponce de León set sail in March 1513 with three ships. According to early historians, he anchored off the eastern coast of Florida on April 2 and came ashore a day later, choosing the name “La Florida” in part because it was the Easter season (Pascua Florida in Spanish). Ponce de León then journeyed down through the Florida Keys and up the western coast, where he skirmished with Indians, before beginning a roundabout journey back to Puerto Rico. Along the way he purportedly discovered the Gulf Stream, which proved to be the fastest route for sailing back to Europe.
Eight years later, Ponce de León returned to Florida’s southwestern coast in an attempt to establish a colony, but he was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow. Just before leaving, he sent letters to his new king, Charles V, and to the future Pope Adrian VI. Once again, the explorer made no mention of the Fountain of Youth, focusing instead on his desire to settle the land, spread Christianity and discover whether Florida was an island or peninsula. No log of either voyage has survived, and no archaeological footprint has ever been uncovered.
Nonetheless, historians began linking Ponce de León with the Fountain of Youth not long after his death. In 1535 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés accused Ponce de León of seeking the fountain in order to cure his sexual impotence. “He was being discredited [as] an idiot and weakling,” Smith explained. “This is machismo culture in Spain at the height of the Counter-Reformation.” The accusation is almost certainly untrue, Smith added, since Ponce de León fathered several children and was under 40 years old at the time of his first expedition.
Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who lived with Indians in Florida for many years after surviving a shipwreck, also derided Ponce de León in his 1575 memoir, saying it was a cause for merriment that he sought out the Fountain of Youth. One of the next authors to weigh in was Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, the Spanish king’s chief historian of the Indies. In 1601 he penned a detailed and widely read account of Ponce de León’s first voyage. Although Herrera only referred to the Fountain of Youth in passing, writing that it turned “old men to boys,” he helped solidify it in the public’s imagination. “They are really more entertainment than attempts to write a true history,” Francis said of these works.
The Fountain of Youth legend was now alive and well. It did not gain much traction in the United States, however, until the Spanish ceded Florida in 1819. Famous writers of the time such as Washington Irving then began portraying Ponce de León as hapless and vain. Artists also got in on the act, including Thomas Moran, who painted an oversize canvas of Ponce de León meeting with Indians. By the early 20th century, a statue of the explorer had been placed in the central plaza of Florida’s oldest city, St. Augustine, and a nearby tourist attraction pretended to be the actual Fountain of Youth. To this day, tens of thousands of visitors come every year to sample the sulfur-smelling well water. “It does not taste good,” said Smith, who worked there for four days in college. “Imagine what you would think the Fountain of Youth would taste like. It doesn’t taste like that.” Meanwhile, some grade school textbooks continue to present Ponce de León’s search for the fountain as historical fact.
In 2013, Ponce de León was back in the spotlight. In celebration of the 500th anniversary of his landing, reenactments took place in St. Augustine and Melbourne Beach, Florida, both of which claim to be the site where he first dropped anchor. There was also a Catholic mass in St. Augustine featuring a replica of the 15th-century font used to baptize him in Spain and a mass in Melbourne Beach, along with the unveiling of more statues and a commemorative stamp.
What would Ponce de León make of all this attention, not all of it positive? “My take on that is that no publicity is bad publicity,” Smith said. “He’s a household name, and maybe in the end that’s what he was looking for.”
As for DeLeon Springs State Park in Central Florida, there are no known records linking Juan Ponce de León to the spring. The name of the area was changed from Spring Garden to Ponce de Leon Springs to attract tourists after the Jacksonville, Tampa, Key West Railway was constructed in 1886. Spanish missions, however, were established in the late 1500s. The native people encountered here were referred to as the Mayaca, differing from the Timucuans in that they were fisher-hunter-gatherers, while the Timucuans were sedentary agriculturalists. The Spanish would return in 1783 after regaining the land from England (who had held it since 1763), granting land, including the spring, to William Williams in 1804. He established the first plantation, calling it "Spring Garden," where corn, cotton, and sugar cane were grown, using enslaved Africans to perform the work.
Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821. The Woodruffs owned the plantation from 1823 to 1830, selling it to Colonel Orlando Rees, who built the only water-powered sugar mill in Florida. John James Audubon visited Spring Garden in January, 1836, where he first painted the limpkin. The plantation was destroyed by the Seminole Indians in December, 1835, at the beginning of the Second Seminole War and again in 1864 by the Union troops during the American Civil War. After the mill stopped operating in 1864, the building deteriorated until only the wheel remained in the late 1800s. For some unknown reason, the mill building was reconstructed in the early 1900s. The building again fell into disrepair until it was renovated by the Schwarze family in 1961. That year they opened the Old Spanish Sugar Mill Restaurant, which has operated continuously since then.
The area attracted tourists in the 1880s after the railroad arrived, when it was advertised as a winter resort for the springs' alleged healing powers; it was called the Fountain of Youth. A hotel was built near the spring, and a small steamboat brought visitors by water. In 1925, the fourteen-room Ponce de Leon Hotel was constructed; this was the first resort with all the amenities, attracting more upscale northern clientele. In 1953, after a $1 million project, the Ponce de Leon Springs attraction opened. It featured Exotic Birds, Alligator Pens, Audubon Trail, Jungle Cruise, Hotel and Peacock Dining Room, Old Methuselah cypress tree, SCUBA School and Museum, and two waterskiing elephants--Sunshine Sally and Queenie. The attraction closed in the mid-1960s, the termite-infested hotel was torn down, and the property was operated as a private recreational park. In 1980, a local Save Our Spring group was formed, convincing the State of Florida and Volusia County to purchase the spring and 55 acres for $1 million. In June, 1982, De Leon Springs State Park opened.
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