Pensacola, a city of over a quarter-million people, overlooks 15-mile-wide Pensacola Bay. Named for the Panzacola Indians, the city has over 400 years of history, dating back to Diego Miruelo who discovered the bay in 1516. Tristán de Luna established a colony with 1,400 settlers, mostly from Mexico, on its shores in 1559. It lasted until a hurricane wiped it out two years later.

Though the Spanish established a second settlement in Pensacolain 1698, the French captured it in 1719. Possession bounced back and forth until the city officially returned to Spanish rule in 1722. For better defense, the Spaniards moved the settlement to Santa Rosa Island, but a hurricane flattened it in 1752, so they moved the settlement to its present location on the mainland later that year. A decade later, the British took over Florida, so the Spaniards in Pensacola fled to Mexico. The town filled with Tories fleeing the American Revolution and became very prosperous. In 1781 the Spanish recaptured the town in the Battle of Pensacola and routed the British, but two years later the Treaty of Paris ceded all of Florida back to the Spanish.

The U.S. Navy established a naval yard in well-sheltered Pensacola Bay in 1825. By the time of the Civil War, Pensacola had become the largest city in Florida, siding with the Confederacy. It fell to Union forces early in the war, and the town sank into a depression that lasted until the late nineteenth century when new railroad lines from Alabama and Georgia helped revitalize the naval industry. With better rail connections and a well-developed network of river steamboats, the city became an important port of call. The Navy helped boost Pensacola's economy again in 1914, when it established the first flight-training center at the Naval Air Station. Today, the Navy is still the city's biggest employer.