San Antonio: The Mission Trail on the Interstate

San Antonio sits at the edge of the Edwards Plateau, where the limestone hills of the Hill Country meet the flat coastal plain. The Coahuiltecan-speaking peoples of this region, dozens of smaller nations that Spanish colonial records lumped under a single name, had lived along the San Antonio River for thousands of years before the first Spanish mission was established here in seventeen eighteen. The missions came quickly after that: five of them, strung along the river within a few miles of each other, each one a fortified compound that served simultaneously as a church, a military outpost, and a place where Indigenous people were gathered, baptized, taught Spanish agricultural techniques, and made to labor.

The Alamo, which you probably know as a battle site, was originally Mission San Antonio de Valero, established in seventeen eighteen. The battle of eighteen thirty-six, thirteen days, the phrase that ended careers of men who did not hold the walls, happened in the mission's granary. The four missions south of the Alamo, authorized by Congress as a National Historical Park in nineteen seventy-eight, are less famous and considerably better preserved.

They are still active Catholic parishes. Mass is still said in them. The acequia system that carried water from the river to the mission fields still has intact sections.

San Antonio managed to keep most of its Spanish colonial infrastructure intact through the nineteenth century, partly because it was a military town and then a cattle town that did not always have the money to tear things down and build something new. The River Walk, which is what most visitors come to see, is a nineteen thirties Depression-era public works project that turned a seasonal flood channel into a pedestrian promenade. It works.

The missions are real. The history along this river is older and stranger than the Tex-Mex on the menu.