Spanish Governor's Palace: Last Wall of a Vanished Empire
Near San Antonio, Texas
The building at Military Plaza that locals call the Spanish Governor's Palace is not really a palace. What it began as was the Commandancia, the home and office of the captain of Presidio San Antonio de Bejar, built and completed in seventeen forty-nine as part of Spain's hold on the frontier. It is the last standing piece of that entire presidio compound.
The name on the keystone above the door reads seventeen forty-nine. For more than a century after independence it served various unglamorous functions, including as a saloon and a tailor shop. The city of San Antonio purchased it in nineteen twenty-eight, restored it, and opened it to the public.
Today it is a National Historic Landmark and the only surviving aristocratic eighteenth-century Spanish colonial residence in the state of Texas.
