Founding Day, May 1718

On the first of May, seventeen eighteen, a Franciscan priest named Antonio de Olivares performed the rites that established Mission San Antonio de Valero on the west bank of San Pedro Creek, not far from where it joined the river. Four days later, Governor Martín de Alarcón, who had crossed the Rio Grande with about thirty families earlier that spring, founded the villa and the presidio beside it. Three institutions planted within a week, each needing the other to survive.

Spain was moving fast. French Louisiana pressed from the east, and the borderlands of New Spain had to be held. San Antonio was chosen because the water was good, the land was open, and it sat almost exactly halfway between the Rio Grande crossings and the Red River frontier. It was a calculated strategic position dressed as a mission town.

By seventeen thirty-one, the original mission had been joined by four more, most of them relocated from East Texas where French pressure had made them untenable. That same year, fifty-six Canary Islanders arrived after a long journey by ship and then by foot from Veracruz. They were not missionaries or soldiers. They were civilians, brought explicitly to give the settlement permanence. They founded the Villa de San Fernando de Béxar on July second of that year, elected the first alcalde on the first of August, and laid out the streets around Main Plaza in a grid that still orients the city's downtown core.

In seventeen eighteen, the spot was a collection of brush huts near a reliable spring. Within thirteen years it had a cathedral facing a civic square, five missions strung along the river, a military garrison, and a civilian government. San Antonio was, from the start, built to last.