The Spanish Governor's Palace: The Only One Left
Near San Antonio, Texas
On Military Plaza, a short walk from Main Plaza where the Canary Islanders laid out their first civic grid in seventeen thirty-one, a low stone building stands behind a carved keystone that reads seventeen forty-nine. That date, the year the building was completed, is also the year it became the working office and residence of the Captain of the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar. In seventeen seventy-two, when the administrative reorganization of New Spain shifted authority northward, it became the seat of government for all of Spanish Texas.
The building is the Spanish Governor's Palace, and it is the only surviving example in the entire state of Texas of an aristocratic eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial townhouse. The designation is precise: not one of the thousands of other structures from that era remains in comparable completeness. The keystone carries the coat of arms of King Ferdinand the Sixth. The walls are thick caliche and limestone. The floor in the main sala is original fired tile.
The palace fell into private hands after Texas independence and spent decades as a series of shops, a restaurant, a school, and at one point a tailor's establishment. A preservation campaign that included Adina De Zavala, one of the women who also fought to preserve the Alamo's long barracks, eventually persuaded the city to purchase the property. The city reconstructed it according to historical plans and opened it as a city-owned museum in nineteen thirty.
What survives is modest by European standards. The rooms are small; the garden is quiet. But the building is genuinely irreplaceable. There is nothing else like it standing in Texas, and there has not been for two centuries.
