Yanaguana: The Payaya and San Pedro Springs

Long before the city had a name in Spanish, before the missions or the presidio or the stone walls of any palace, this ground had a name in the language of the people who lived here. They called it Yanaguana. Most translators render that as something like "land of spirit waters," a reference to the springs that fed the San Antonio River just above where the city's heart would eventually be built.

The Payaya were a Coahuiltecan-speaking band of hunter-gatherers whose territory ranged across the San Antonio River valley and southwest toward the Frio River. They moved seasonally, following prickly pear harvests and the rhythms of pecans along the creek bottoms. The Spanish recorded their presence as early as sixteen ninety, when exploration parties noted a substantial encampment near San Pedro Springs. The Payaya gathered nuts there in abundance, fished, and maintained alliances with neighboring bands including the Pampopa.

The springs at San Pedro were the reason anyone stopped here at all. The water surfaced clear and reliable from the limestone aquifer in what is now often described as one of the oldest municipal parks in the United States. A royal grant from King Philip the Fifth of Spain in seventeen twenty-nine declared those waters public land for all settlers, a designation the city has honored ever since. The park that surrounds the springs today covers forty-six acres and has been in continuous public use since at least the early seventeen hundreds.

The Payaya who had gathered pecans at these springs for generations entered Mission San Antonio de Valero when it was founded in seventeen eighteen. Their descendants are counted among the families of modern San Antonio. The springs still flow, quieter now than before the aquifer dropped, but still there, still cold, still surfacing from the same limestone shelf the Payaya knew.