VOA's Dora Mekouar is in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States. More than half a century before the Pilgrims set up a colony at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, and 42 years before the first permanent English settlement in North America was founded at Jamestown in Virginia, the Spanish established the city of St. Augustine in the far northeastern corner of Florida. And yet, despite its status as the oldest