Aviles Street was once called Hospital Street, and along it sits the Ximenez-Fatio House Museum, just south of St. Augustine's Plaza de la Constitución. This is one of the best-preserved, most authentic Second Spanish Period (1783–1821) residential buildings in the city, sitting at the heart of Old Town, the oldest continuously occupied community here. In 1973 it joined the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2012 it was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark.
Since 1939 the house has been privately owned and managed by The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in The State of Florida, whose careful restoration interprets the site as a fashionable boarding house from Florida’s first tourist boom, which began after 1821. Inside, the rooms are furnished and presented to tell the stories of the visitors who lodged here, the women who owned and managed the house, and how people lived during Florida’s territorial period. As you let that history settle, notice how the building sits on Aviles, the oldest archaeologically documented street in the United States, and glance north toward the Plaza de la Constitución and the life that still surrounds it.