Inside the historic Hotel Alcazar in downtown St. Augustine you will find the Lightner Museum. The museum contains antiques, mostly American Gilded Age pieces, within an 1887 Spanish Renaissance Revival style building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Henry Flagler commissioned the Hotel Alcazar to appeal to wealthy tourists who traveled south for the winter on his railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway.
New York architects Carrère and Hastings designed this building in the Spanish Renaissance Revival style; they also designed the Ponce de León Hotel across the street, now part of the campus of Flagler College. Both buildings are notable as among the earliest examples of poured concrete construction in the world. The Alcazar was a lavish resort: a steam room, massage parlor, sulfur baths, gymnasium, a three‑story ballroom, and what was once described as the world’s largest indoor swimming pool.
After years as an elegant winter resort it closed in 1932. The layers of history here are literal in the stone, ornament and vaulted spaces. Picture the world's largest indoor pool once filling this Spanish Renaissance Revival building, before it closed its doors as a resort in 1932.