The Fountain of Youth

A 500-year-old legend rooted in a real landing and real springs

The Fountain of Youth is one of the oldest stories people tell: water that turns back age for anyone who drinks or bathes in it. Herodotus put such a spring among the long-lived Macrobians, whose bathers came out sleek and smelling of violets. The Alexander Romance had the conqueror's cook wash a salted fish in a spring and watch it come back to life, and a French version of the 1170s gave Alexander three magic springs in India, one of them restoring youth, all rising in the Garden of Eden.

In the New World the story fastened on Juan Ponce de León. Pushed out of the governorship of Puerto Rico in 1511, he was offered the land of Bimini by King Ferdinand as a consolation, if he could pay for an expedition and find it. He sailed in 1513 and landed instead in Florida, which he claimed for the Spanish Crown. No known document from his lifetime mentions a fountain, not even his contracts with the Crown, and he died at 47 of an arrow wound taken in a fight in Florida.

The fountain arrived in 1535, in the Historia general y natural de las Indias of the court chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who sided with Diego Columbus, Ponce's rival in Puerto Rico, and thought him gullible and dull-witted. Oviedo has him deceived by Indians into a futile hunt for the waters, a literary jab when believing water could reverse ageing was thought silly. Hernando d'Escalante Fontaneda, shipwrecked in Florida as a boy and held captive for seventeen years, wrote in 1575 of the healing waters of a lost river he called the Jordan, though he doubted Ponce had ever looked for it. Antonio de Herrera dropped the doubts and added local caciques making regular visits and frail old men restored enough to take new wives. By the 17th century, as the historian J. Michael Francis puts it, an invention had become history.

St. Augustine claimed the landing. In 1904 Luella Day McConnell, a Chicago physician turned Klondike adventurer, bought the grounds with cash and diamonds, sold water from a well dug in 1875 and announced she had found a coquina cross laid by Ponce himself; a city resident later testified to watching it being put down. Nothing shows Ponce ever landed there. Yet the ground turned out to be genuinely old: Smithsonian digs in 1934 found Christian Timucua burials, and later finds identify the park as the site of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's 1565 settlement, the start of the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in North America. Hundreds of visitors a day still drink from the stone well.