When visitors come to San Antonio to see the Alamo, the most common reaction is surprise. “It looks so small!” the tourists say. The reason, of course, is that San Antonio has grown up around the Alamo. City streets and an abandoned post office encroach on the ancient mission’s boundaries. The Alamo is a shrine to heroes, but it has lost its heroic dimensions.

Fortunately, you can discover the sense of space and history just a few miles to the south, at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The park consists of four secluded eighteenth-century missions, at intervals of about two miles, that still represent the vastness and grandeur of the Texas frontier at the height of the Spanish empire. The churches stand in spacious fields, most of them surrounded by stone walls. The two northern missions, Concepción and San José, are larger and more ornate than their southern counterparts, San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco de la Espada. The Christmas season is the best time to discover the missions. The churches are decorated with red and green banners, and many of the grounds are lit by luminarias.

The farther south of downtown you go, following the vexing twists and turns of the San Antonio River, the more the feeling of isolation increases and the more you begin to feel lost--in geography as well as in time. San Juan and Espada are bounded on one side by the river and on the other by rambling cemeteries and a pre-World War II airfield. By the time you make your way through the narrow streets and past the dilapidated houses leading up to Espada, you have lost all touch with urban San Antonio and the late twentieth century.

Texas, the predominantly Anglo Texas that we know today, has only existed for 158 years. For 145 years before that, Texas belonged to Spain. What an afternoon’s tour of the four San Antonio missions reveals is the hidden truth of all history, which is simply this: The past is with us yet.

Judged by their original purpose--to train Indians to become citizens of Spain--there is no question that the missions were political failures. By the late eighteenth century only a handful of Indians were left. The rest either had died from measles or smallpox, had been killed in Apache or Comanche raids, or had run for their lives. The Franciscans had abandoned the missions by the mid-1790s, and Spain turned them over to the surviving Indians. If you could look at the missions through the eyes of a Spanish colonial official, you would see the ruins of a failed adventure.

But there are other ways to view the missions. As religious, agricultural, and educational centers, the missions are symbols of triumph. San Antonio today is predominantly Roman Catholic, thanks to the missions. Much of what we think of as native Texas law and lore was actually imported to these old missions by the Franciscans. Our Texas water laws aren’t English; they were derived from Spanish law. Indian vaqueros who worked at the mission compounds were the first cowboys. The mission Indian’s galón was the forerunner to the Texas ten-gallon hat. His chaparreras became chaps.

The four missions are once again active churches. They were taken over by the Archdiocese of San Antonio between 1870 and 1930 and are staffed by priests who say mass every Sunday. Many of their parishioners are descendants of the original Spaniards and Indians who built the missions starting in 1720. In the whispers of the prayers and immutability of the mission stones, New Spain lives on.

To follow the mission trail, click on the links below.

Concepción | San José | San Juan Capistrano | San Francisco de la Espada

For other Texas mission links:
San Antonio's Mission Trail
Texas Archeology E-Journal
The Historic Missions of West Texas
Texas Mission--Indian Lands