One of the most famous myths in history is the myth of the Fountain of Youth, a spring that supposedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. Tales of such a fountain have been recounted across the world for thousands of years, but the legend became particularly prominent in the sixteenth century, when it became associated with the career of the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first governor of Puerto Rico. Yet the myth of a “fountain of youth” reaches back in time to Herodotus, a Greek historian who wrote of the Fountain of Youth in the fifth century BCE and to Alexander the Great, who was said to have sought a “fountain” with similar qualities. In the medieval period, Prester John enhanced the legend in his stories of a mythic Christian king who searched for the Fountain of Youth. In the North American context, the legend recounts how the Taino Indians of the Caribbean region directed European explorers to Bimini, two small islands in the Bahamas, which is the supposed site of the Fountain of Youth in Ponce de León’s journey of discovery.
Juan Ponce de León and his crew set sail on March 3, 1513, from a Spanish port in Puerto Rico, hoping to locate the fabled island of Bimini and secure his fortune. Along the way, his three ships happened upon a much larger landmass, which he named “La Florida” in honor of the season Pasqua florida (Easter of the flowers). Where exactly he first set foot on Florida’s Atlantic coast is unknown, but many scholars now believe it was near present-day Melbourne Beach on the Atlantic coast. The persistent myth is that Ponce de León went looking for a fountain of youth on the island of Bimini and reached the shores of Florida instead, but in truth there is little evidence to suggest that the story as commonly told is anything but legend. Nevertheless, Ponce de León’s journey in search of the fountain has remained part of the folklore of the Sunshine State.
In this image, Juan Ponce de León (ca. 1460–1521) and his men sample the waters of “the Fountain of Youth.” Although stories of sacred or magical waters which could heal or provide eternal youth stretch back to antiquity, they are most closely associated in the New World with Ponce de León, a notable Spanish explorer and the first governor of Puerto Rico. The Fountain of Youth remains a significant feature in American popular lore, often appearing as a plot device in television programs and movies, and has long been associated with the tourist industry in Florida. (Library of Congress)
A major contributor to the Fountain of Youth myth was Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, the chronicler of Ponce de León’s expeditions, who first mentions the Fountain of Youth in his account Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierrafirme del Mar Océano (1601), which was, in turn, based on the memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda in 1575. This early account places the restorative waters in Florida and mentions Ponce de León looking for them there. A similar account appeared earlier in Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias (1552).
Escalante’s account is now considered an important document of early Florida history, but it is also one of the first written references to the most enduring myth of Ponce de León’s quest for the Fountain of Youth. According to Escalante, superstitious Indians in Cuba and in Santo Domingo believed that a magical river existed somewhere on the Florida peninsula and that bathing in it turned old men young again. He mocked the Indians for believing what he considered such a foolish legend and he derided any Spaniard who believed such a tall tale. Yet, Escalante was only repeating an apocryphal story that had appeared in a work published more than two decades after Ponce de León’s 1513 expedition to Florida and more than a decade after his death, as there is no historical evidence to suggest that Ponce de León was even aware of the fabled spring, let alone that he risked life and fortune on a quest to locate it.
Since the publication of Herrera’s chronicle and Escalante’s account, numerous scholars have attempted to dismantle the narrative, often with no success. In 1965, Luís Rafael Arana contested the claim about Ponce de León’s quest and questioned that there was any evidence that the explorer was even aware of the story. In 1993, Douglas T. Peck criticized previous historical scholarship for “perverting” the “factual past” in favor of the Fountain of Youth fable. Most recently, Tony Horwitz’s satire, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008), presented the Fountain of Youth story as one of many contemporary historical hoaxes whose main purpose is to attract tourists.
The idea of Florida as a land of eternal health was a theme of Florida’s earliest promoters to boost tourism. Health spas and springs were developed in the late nineteenth century, with alleged cures for everything from consumption and jaundice to rheumatism and syphilis. The golden age of Florida tourism, and the true beginning of the myth of the Fountain of Youth, really started with World War II when many of the grand hotels from the 1920s and 1930s boom were pressed into service as barracks and hospitals during the war as “military guests” descended on the existing attractions, and enterprising developers built and marketed parks to capitalize on the military guests. After the war, many GIs returned to the state with their families, some on vacation, others as permanent residents. State tourism officials built on this development and began to aggressively promote the state as a tropical paradise where fantasies came to life, and many of the state’s most enduring tourist attractions revolved around the enduring myth of the Fountain of Youth, such as the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park in St. Augustine, a tribute to the spot where Ponce de León is traditionally said to have landed. The first archaeological digs in the park began in 1934 and were performed by the Smithsonian Institution. The project uncovered a large number of Christianized Timucua burials, which were eventually identified as the location of the first Christian mission in the United States, the Mission of Nombre de Dios founded by Franciscan friars in 1587.
The myth has also been helped considerably by pop culture through the reproductions of eye-catching postcards, vintage advertisements and photos, comic books, films, and other visual materials, which continues to the present day with what has been designated as “Ponceabilia,” relics from the era when the explorer’s image was used to promote Florida.
In literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the fountain in his short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), while British artist, poet, and writer William Morris plotted his fantasy novel, The Well at the World’s End (1896), as the quest for a legendary well that has many of the same properties as the Fountain of Youth. On television, Orson Welles directed and starred in a 1958 TV program based on the legend. An interesting variant of the legend appeared in the 1976 comedy series Big John, Little John, in which a middle-aged science teacher drinks from the Fountain of Youth while on a vacation in Florida and then switches back and forth from twelve years old to forty-three years old at unexpected moments. Natalie Babbitt’s novel Tuck Everlasting and its film adaption (2002) introduces a family that becomes immortal after drinking from a spring that was actually a fountain of youth.
Earlier, in 1953, Walt Disney produced a cartoon, “Don’s Fountain of Youth,” in which Donald Duck supposedly discovers the famous fountain. However, the fountain features even more prominently in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), in which Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Hector Barbossa embark on a quest to find the elusive Fountain of Youth only to discover that Blackbeard and his daughter are after it too. In 1997, on their album Pop, U2 made a reference to the Fountain of Youth in the song “The Playboy Mansion.”
Beginning in 2013, celebrations like Vive Florida 500 commemorated the state’s 500th anniversary and other milestones, using as its starting point the arrival of Ponce de León in 1513. Today, the idea of Florida as a place of youth persists as Ponce de León’s quest for the Fountain of Youth incorporates Florida’s birth myth, a fitting symbol for a state obsessed with second chances and external exuberance.
Martin J. Manning
See also Atlantis; Cibola or Cities of Gold; Founding Myths; Good Luck Charms
Further Reading
Francis, J. Michael. 2011. “Who Started the Myth about a Fountain of Youth?” Forum: The Magazine of the Florida Humanities Council 35 (3): 6–9.
Fuson, Robert H. 2000. Juan Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida. Granville, OH: McDonald and Woodward.
Kilby, Rick. 2013. Finding the Fountain of Youth: Ponce de Leon and Florida’s Magical Waters. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Lawson, Edward W. 1946. The Discovery of Florida and Its Discoverer Juan Ponce de León. St. Augustine, FL: E. W. Lawson.
Mormino, Gary R. 2005. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Fountain of Youth—Primary Document
Ponce de León’s Search for the Fountain of Youth (1513)
Ponce de León traveled to the New World with Christopher Columbus on his second journey to New Spain, and then in 1513 was granted permission to sail northward to explore and colonize the islands around what is known today as Florida. The earliest account of his search for a legendary spring “that restores men from aged men to youths” and his eventual discovery of Florida is Antonio de Herrera’s Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano (1601), a portion of which is presented here in modern translation.
On Sunday they sighted land. On Monday they proceeded along the coast, in order to examine it, and on Wednesday they made harbor thereon and dressed the yards and sails, although they were unable to learn what country it was. The greater number considered it Cuba, because they found canoes, dogs, cuttings from knives and from iron tools; and not because anyone knew that it was Cuba, but by the argument that for Cuba they took that course, and that it ran east and west like it, except that they found themselves eighteen long leagues off the route for it to be Cuba. On Friday they set sail from here in search of Los Martires. On Sunday they reached the island of Achecambei, and passing by Santa Pola and Santa Marta, they reached Chequescha. They sailed as far as some islets that are on the shoals of the Lucayos more to the west, and anchored on them on the 18th of July, where they took on a supply of water. And they gave to them the name La Vieja, from an old Indian woman that they found, and no other person. They are in twenty-eight degrees. The name that La Florida had, in the beginning could not be learned in the opinion of its discoverers, because, seeing that that point of land projected so much they considered it as an island; the Indians, as it was the mainland, gave the name of each province and the Spaniards thought that they were deceiving them; but in the end, because of their importunities, the Indians said that it was called Cautio, a name that the Lucayos Indians gave to that land because the people of it covered certain parts of their body with palm leaves woven in the form of a plait. On the 25th of July they set out from the islets on the lookout for Bimini, sailing among islands that seemed water-swept. And, being stopped, not knowing by what way to pass with the ships, Juan Ponce sent the bark to examine an island that he considered overflowed and found it to be the island of Bahama. So said the old woman that they carried with them, and Diego Miruelo, the pilot, whom they met with a bark from Hispaniola that was going on its own venture, although others say that by luck they had made port there. They set out Saturday, the 6th of August, by the route they had been following, and until finding the depths they ran Northwest a quarter west as far as an islet of rocks alone at the edge of the depths. They changed course and ran by the edge of the shoals to the South. They changed this course next day, although Bimini was not in that direction. And for fear of the currents that another time were driving the ships to the coast of La Florida or Cautio (as they then called it) they took up their return route for the island of San Juan de Puerto Rico. And having sailed until the 18th of August they found themselves at daybreak two leagues from an island of the Lucayos, and ran three leagues, as far as the point of this island, where on the 19th they anchored and stayed until the 22nd. From here they delayed four days in arriving at Guanima, because wind and passage failed them. And they turned back from its coast to the island of Gautao; and by storms they were kept engaged there without being able to go from it twenty-seven days, until the 23rd of September. And the bark from the island of Hispaniola that had joined them was lost there, although the people were saved. Having overhauled the vessels, it appearing to Juan Ponce that he had labored much, he resolved, although against his will, to send some one to examine the island of Bimini; for he wished to do it himself, because of the account he had of the wealth of this island, and especially of that particular spring so the Indians said that restores men from aged men to youths, the which he had not been able to find, by reason of shoals and currents and contrary weather. He sent then, as captain of the ship, Juan Perez de Ortubia, and as pilot Anton de Alaminos. They carried two Indians for pilots through the shoals, because they are so many that one proceeds with much danger because of them. This ship departed on the, 17th [27th?] of September, and Juan Ponce the next day for his voyage. And in twenty-one days he arrived within sight of San Juan and went to make harbor in the bay of Puerto Rico; where, after having found Bimini, although not the spring, the other ship arrived with the account that it was a large island, cool, and with many springs and woodlands. The discovery by Juan Ponce of La Florida so ended, without knowledge that it was the mainland; nor for some years thereafter was that assurance obtained.
Source: Davis, T. Frederick, “Ponce de Leon’s First Voyage and Discovery of Florida.” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 14:1 (1935): 7–49. Used by permission of the Florida Historical Society.