Goliad: Where Texas Was Born and Nearly Lost

Goliad is one of the oldest Spanish settlements in Texas. Franciscan missionaries and royal soldiers established the mission and presidio here in seventeen forty-nine, moving them from the Guadalupe River after decades of struggling to hold the region against Apache and Comanche raids. The name itself is an anagram of Hidalgo, honoring the Mexican priest who launched the war for independence from Spain.

By eighteen twenty-nine the Mexican government had chartered the settlement as a town. By eighteen thirty-six it was the site of one of the Texas Revolution's defining catastrophes. Presidio La Bahia, now restored and open to the public, is among the best restored Spanish colonial forts in the country, a reminder that the story of Goliad runs nearly three hundred years deep.