The river was Payaya homeland — one of many Coahuiltecan peoples of South Texas — 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. The missions were built on the labor and conversion of the region's Indigenous peoples, a hard history the stones carry alongside their beauty.
The missions came first, but the town proper came in 1731, when fifty-six colonists from the Canary Islands — sent across the Atlantic by the Spanish crown — laid out San Fernando de Béxar around a central plaza and began the church that became San Fernando Cathedral. It was the first organized civil town in Texas, and their plaza is still the heart of downtown. For the next century San Antonio was the most important town between the Rio Grande and the Louisiana line — the capital of Spanish, and then Mexican, Texas.
Why People Visit San Antonio Texas
- Walk the River Walk (Paseo del Río), the cypress-shaded riverside promenade below street level.
- Visit the Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero), the first of the city's five Spanish colonial missions.
- Tour Mission San José, the "Queen of the Missions," with its carved Rose Window and stone granary.
- Follow the Mission Trail to Concepción, San Juan, and Espada along the river.
- Step inside San Fernando Cathedral on Main Plaza, begun by the 1731 Canary Island colonists.
- Explore the Pearl, the restored historic brewery district north of downtown.
- Wander Brackenridge Park and the Japanese Tea Garden, with stone footbridges and koi ponds.
- Browse Market Square (El Mercado), the largest Mexican market in the United States.
