Start gathering the candles. On Monday, Florida turns 499 â?? and for the next year-plus Florida is going to celebrate/commemorate/stage exhibits about a birthday no other state has had: the big 5-0-0.
For it was on April 2, 1513, that Spanish explorer Ponce De Leon first set foot on the southeast peninsula of North America and named it La Florida. On that day â?? a Saturday, so hopefully Ponce's crew got paid overtime â?? Florida became the first state in the eventual United States to be discovered by Europeans.
Or at least, that's the story. People kept pretty sketchy notes in 1513, and they were all in a foreign language. So historians have spent the past five centuries interpreting, extrapolating, theorizing and calling each other to ask, "How do you Google in Spanish?"
Supposedly, Ponce and his crew left Puerto Rico on March 3, 1513, looking for the island of Bimini, where legend said there were riches aplenty (which explains the world dominance of the Bahamas). Instead, on Easter Sunday, March 27, 1513, they spotted Florida.
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