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.
What's with Jovita Idar? San Antonio's story keeps adding voices, and one of them is hers. Born in Laredo in 1885, she trained as a schoolteacher, then turned to journalism, writing for her family's Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica on the education and rights of Mexican Americans in Texas. In 1911 she helped found the Liga Femenil Mexicanista, one of the earliest Mexican American women's organizations in the state; in 1914, when Texas Rangers came to shut down the newspaper El Progreso, she stood in the doorway and turned them back. Idar moved to San Antonio in 1917 and gave the city the rest of her working life: a free kindergarten, interpreting for Spanish-speaking hospital patients, editing El Heraldo Cristiano. In 2023 the United States Mint honored her on a quarter in the American Women Quarters Program, her figure framed by the mastheads of the papers she wrote for.
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.
