The gals I had lunch with on Thursday strongly suggested I start my tour of the area with a visit to at least one of the missions near San Antonio so as to get a better idea of the historical context of the Alamo.
I was going going to go out today, having woken up to super overcast and coldish conditions, but the sky was clear by noon and I was itching to get outside.
I started with Mission San José because it is the best restored and it has a visitors’ centre, guided tours, and a movie (all free, including parking!). From there, I went to Mission Concepción because it is the best preserved. There were a few others to see, but I did not feel compelled to tour them.
Briefly, the Missions were established by Spanish Franciscan friars in the 18th century as settlements to teach the south Texas Indians how to be Spanish citizens. This was how Spain established its presence in the area. If it couldn’t populate it with real Spaniards, then it would create new Spaniards.
The Indian tribes were being attacked from the north by Comanches, Apaches, and other plains nations who had horses. From the south came a wave of European illnesses. The south Texans accepted their bitter fate and that sometimes the only way to survive is to surrender. They went to live in the missions and learned the Spanish way of life, the language, and the religion, Roman Catholicism.
The missions were eventually secularized and turned over to their inhabitants. Some fell to the wayside and others, like the Alamo, were used by the military.
The architecture of the missions was exquisite! I’m glad I watched the movie, Gente de razon (literally, people of reason, but actually human beings), which talks about the fate of the Indians and how they live on as the Tejano people.
The missions of San Antonio were churches, farms, villages, ranches, and schools.
Mission San José visitors’ centre.
I wonder how old this tree is.
First glimpse of Mission San José.
All the missions have four of these round rooms at each corner. There were canons on the bottom and riflemen at the top.
Indian quarters.
Inside the round defense room.
Ceiling.
80 people would have to share one oven like this. 8 to 10 people would live two rooms in the Indian quarters.
This is the only original part of the structure. Most of the walls were dismantled during secularization in the early 1800s, with the walls used to build home.
The Franciscans lived in this area.
The bell tower was destroyed, rebuilt, struck down by God (well, lightening), and then rebuilt a third time. The window under construction is called the rose window and is very famous and popular with romantics.
Inside of the rose window.
This magnificent chapel is still used today.
These are authentic period colours. The entire exterior of the church would have been painted in colours like these.
The sculpture around the door tells the story of the Roman Catholic faith and its virtues.
Grave of the man who supposedly carved the rose window in memory of his beloved who died en route to the new world.
This gristmill still works. The ditch is called an acequia, a technologically marvelous technique of diverting water from the San Antonio river to irrigate fields with no loss of water pressure. Here, the acequia is full of recycled water.
Some of the food that would have been grown in the fields outside the mission.
The granary where the Indians would get their weekly rations.
Flying buttress outside the granary (flying because it is not flush against the building; who thought my degree in medieval history would come in handy on an RV blog?!)
There would not have been wells like these at the time of the missions, but I thought it looked cool.
Notice the cacti on the roof!
Mission Concepcion
The Indians went from very free lives to highly disciplined ones.
One of the surviving paintings of Mission Concepcion.
In the courtyard.
This is a regular buttress at the entrance to the chapel.
The sign on the left says to watch your step on the stairs. I wish I could have gone up. 🙂
Another painting in an altar room.
I wasn’t expecting such a spectacular dome!
Not sure if this paint is original or not, but it’s unlikely.
The doors are made of fabric.
