A different kind of landmark runs below the streets: the River Walk, the cypress-shaded paseo first designed in 1929 to turn the downtown river into a level of the city all its own. Above it, San Antonio kept layering — German brewers and the old breweries, Texas cattle drives, the rail boom, and a long run as "Military City." Our San Antonio logo gathers the Texas end of that story into a Texas longhorn — the cattle breed that built the open range — and a Lone Star over "1845," the year of statehood and the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Texas place. Printed black-and-white with the worn look of a branding iron or a rodeo poster, the longhorn and star read as Texas in shorthand — cattle country, the Lone Star, the open range — set over the deep Spanish-colonial city the missions built.
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.
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.
