Flagler College Ponce de León Hall (Interior Tours)

Henry Flagler hired architects John Carrère and Thomas Hastings to design the Hotel Ponce de León, built between 1885 and 1888 as a winter resort for wealthy Northerners. The result was a technological showpiece — poured concrete construction, electricity by Thomas Edison, lavish interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Flagler was Standard Oil's co-founder, a Gilded Age industrialist who saw St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, as a destination worth building toward.

The hotel closed in 1967. In 1968 it became the core of Flagler College, a private liberal arts institution — a preservation story as much as an educational one. The building is now a National Historic Landmark.

Interior tours run through Ponce de León Hall, where the Tiffany work survives intact: stained glass windows in the dining hall, mural paintings, one of the largest collections of Tiffany work in a single building anywhere. This is the real reason to come. Not the history lesson — the glass itself, still doing what it was made to do.