St. Augustine Amphitheatre

St. Augustine Amphitheatre—The Amp—serves St. Augustine, south of Jacksonville, with a 4,700-person outdoor main room on former colonial coquina-quarry land within Anastasia State Park. That foundation gives the concert site a tangible link to the shellstone used across early St. Augustine: visitors can still find quarry remnants on the grounds. It is a compact amphitheatre for national tours, framed by park landscape instead of a parking-lot complex.

A drama rebuilt for concerts

The venue began in 1965 as a purpose-built, 2,000-seat home for Cross and Sword, Paul Green’s symphonic outdoor drama about St. Augustine’s founding. Its opening night fell on June 27, 1965, during the city’s 400th-anniversary celebrations. The original aisle seats came from New York’s recently demolished Polo Grounds, with NY markings at their ends—a small, specific trace of the first theatre’s improvised civic ambition.

Cross and Sword reached its final curtain after the 1996 season, leaving a deteriorated building and an uncertain future. In 1999, a lease transfer placed the site with St. Johns County and launched planning and fundraising for a full rebuild. The new Amphitheatre opened in September 2007 on the original footprint, with 4,100 seats, four concession stands, a plaza, an arboretum, and a tensile canopy over the stage. A 2018 seating expansion brought capacity to 4,700.

The present-day room

The calendar casts a wide net: country, alternative, pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, and indie touring acts share space with community programming, the Saturday Farmers Market, free-concert activity, and the September Sing Out Loud Festival. Main-stage shows play beneath the canopy in the open-air amphitheatre. For an intimate alternative, the Backyard Stage runs general-admission, standing-room-only shows behind the main stage, with concessions, a full bar, and local food trucks. The Front Porch adds a 4,800-square-foot pre-show gathering deck at the entrance.