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The river was Payaya homeland — one of many Coahuiltecan peoples of South Texas — and they knew it as Yanaguana long before it carried a Spanish name; a 1691 expedition reached it on St. Anthony's feast day and gave the river his name. In May 1718 Fray Antonio de Olivares and the governor Martín de Alarcón founded Mission San Antonio de Valero and the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar on its banks. Over the next thirteen years four more missions followed up and down the river — the largest concentration of Spanish colonial missions in North America.
A different kind of landmark runs below the streets. In 1929 the architect Robert Hugman drew a plan to turn the downtown river into a level of the city all its own — a cypress-shaded paseo of stone stairs and footbridges, a street of water beneath the street of cars. Above it the city kept layering: the chili queens who sold supper in the plazas for some fifty years and helped seed what the country now calls Tex-Mex — barbacoa and puffy tacos, a bowl of fideo, aguas frescas sweating in the heat — then German brewers, the cattle drives and the rail boom, conjunto accordions, and a long run as “Military City.” And local legend holds that the ghosts of children push stalled cars uphill off a set of railroad tracks on the south side, a story San Antonians have told each other for generations.
Why People Visit San Antonio
People come to San Antonio for the River Walk and the Alamo, but the city rewards anyone who follows the older thread: a chain of five Spanish missions along a quiet river, a downtown laid out by Canary Island colonists in 1731, and a Tejano culture you can hear in the music and taste in the food. It's warm, walkable, and layered — three centuries of South Texas history sitting right alongside the modern city.
