The statue of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés stands in a courtyard surrounded by Gilded Age hotels, which is an odd address for a man the French and British called "The Butcher of Avilés." Menéndez founded St. Augustine on 8 September 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States. His methods were not subtle: he once lured 250 starving French Huguenots to surrender by frying bacon across a river, then had them beheaded ten at a time.

The statue faces a second one across the street: Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil magnate who reinvented St. Augustine three centuries later. It is a pairing that says a great deal about the city.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use these two facing statues as a pivot between St. Augustine's colonial origins and its Gilded Age reinvention, tracing Menéndez's brutal founding campaign and Flagler's transformation of the city into America's first winter resort.