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.
The five missions are the city's crown. San José, the “Queen of the Missions,” still shows its carved Rose Window and great stone granary; Concepción keeps traces of its painted walls; San Juan and Espada anchor the southern end of the river trail. They were built on the labor and conversion of the region's Indigenous peoples, a hard history the stones carry, and the crown secularized them in 1793. Mission San Antonio de Valero, the first of them, is the one the world now knows as the Alamo. A battle was fought there in 1836 during the Texas Revolution, with heavy losses on both sides; it is a solemn place, remembered very differently by different people. In 2015 the five missions were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the only one in Texas.
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.
