Category: South Texas Destinations

I have always loved visiting churches.  We didn’t visit churches much on vacations when I was growing up, probably because my dad is an atheist.  I do remember visiting what looks like Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg in 1979 and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1988.

And while it’s not Notre Dame de Paris, or even York Minster (as I was reminded several times by another transplant), I do love San Fernando Cathedral. I’m sort of an amateur tour guide and San Fernando Cathedral is on nearly every tour I give of the city.

The cathedral was originally the parish church for the colonists from the Canary Islands, who arrived in 1719.  The first stones of what was then called Nuestra Senora de Candelaria y Guadalupe (and which is now San Fernando Cathedral) were laid in the early 1700s.  I have seen numbers ranging from 1729 through 1738.  And, by the way, both aspects of Mary the Mother of Jesus, as Our Lady of Candelaria and as The Virgin of Guadalupe, still have their places in the cathedral.

Beginning in 1868, the building, which had fallen into disrepair, was fixed.  In addition, the church was enlarged and the Gothic front was added. One tower was finished decades before the other, and in 1874, the church was designated a cathedral. You can still see the original church if you go around to the Military Plaza side of the building.

In 2003, the cathedral underwent a major renovation to stabilize the foundation.  Additionally, according to news sources at the time, the Second Vatican Council recommended placing the altar closer to the congregation.  In aid of this, the altar was moved from the front of the church to the center of the church and the seats were placed in a sort of cross shape around the altar.

If you enter the cathedral through the left-hand (viewing from the front) door, you will see a marble casket that says that it contains the remains of Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Jim Bowie.  This is one of the most interesting parts of the cathedral for me.

In the last years of his life, Juan Seguin wrote a letter saying that he buried the remains of Crockett, Travis, and Bowie under the altar of the cathedral (which had been a parish church at the time).  In 1936, when they were replacing the altar, they did, in fact, find human remains.  This caused someone to remember the letter, and so the decision was made that these were, in fact, the remains of Crockett, Travis, and Bowie.  The remains were put on display for a year and then placed in the marble casket.

While this is a romantic story, however, there is some reason for doubt. For example, it is an established fact that the dead from both sides of the battle were burned on three pyres near the Alamo, and no mention is made of any special considerations being taken for the bodies of those three men.  So far as I know, the only fighter on the Texian side whose body was given special consideration was Gregorio Esparza.  Esparza’s brother fought on the Mexican side and he got special permission to claim his brother’s body and give it a burial. Additionally, Seguin was not in San Antonio when the bodies were burned, so he could not have separated their remains out from the rest at that point.  Additionally, the marker says that “other Alamo heroes” are in the marble casket, so perhaps Seguin didn’t separate the bodies out, but took some ashes from the pyre that the three were supposed to have been burned on.

Additionally, the story in the Express said that the bodies were found in three separate graves, and I have found that apparently bodies have been buried in San Fernando Cathedral in the past.  Two of these bodies were Simon de Herrera and Manuel Maria de Salcedo.  Both had been governors of Texas while Mexico was still part of Spain.  During the War for Mexican Independence, one of the battles, The Battle of Rosillo Creek, was fought in 1813 at a location around 11 miles southeast of the cathedral.  Following the battle, Herrera and Salcedo, among others, were executed and a priest, Jose Dario Zambrano, took at least Herrera’s and Salecedo’s bodies and buried them in the church.  Is it likely that some of the the bodies that were exhumed in 1936 were those of Herrera and Salcedo?  Maybe not.  Is it possible?  Definitely.

San Fernando Cathedral is downtown on Main Plaza.  The cathedral is handicap accessible.

Nearly everyone in the United States has some awareness of the Alamo, even if it’s just our fifth-grade teacher saying “something something ‘Remember the Alamo’ something something” in social studies.  Or, “Hey! Isn’t that the movie with John Wayne?” There’s a lot of that going around.

The Alamo, more properly called “Mission de San Antonio de Valero,” was one of the five missions in San Antonio that were founded by Franciscan missionaries from Spain.  The word “Alamo” means “cottonwood,” and no one is sure how the mission got this nickname.

The original Alamo mission was in or near what is now San Pedro Springs Park (writeup to follow later, but for now, the header image on this blog is from the park). The mission moved several times over the years before finally settling in its current location near the San Antonio River.

What we see as the Alamo today is by no means the entire mission.  The mission started not too far behind the current buildings (which were the church and the convento, where the monks lived) and stretched out in front of the mission, across Alamo Street. As I write this, you can see the foundation of the original walls on the other side of Alamo Street. There are discussions of somehow rebuilding the complex, but with buildings that are also historic landmarks on the other side of the street, I find that impracticable.

You may find it odd that the Alamo grounds didn’t to all the way to the river.  That is because the missionaries set up an alternative sort of water delivery system called “acequias.” The acequia system in San Antonio consisted of seven acequias, one for each mission, one for San Fernando de Bexar, the original village that eventually became San Antonio, and another that started out as a flood control measure in the late 19th century.

As an aside, if you know your Catholic saints, I am sure you notice that there is no St. Antonio of Valero or St. Ferdinand of Bexar.  As I point out in my post on St. Augustine, Spaniards named places after the saint’s day that they were first sighted/visited/settled.  San Antonio de Valero was founded on the day of St. Anthony of Padua.  The “Valero” comes from the title of the Viceroy of New Spain at the time, Baltasar de Zúñiga y Guzmán, duque de Arión y marqués de Valero (title copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article, because I’ve got places to go today and didn’t have time to painstakingly transcribe all of that). I would assume that San Fernando de Bexar was founded on May 30, which is St. Fernando’s feast day, and took a different part of Baltasar’s title.  Baltasar was the second son of the Duke of Béjar, Spain.   The “j” turned into an “x” as a result of Mexican influence.

The Alamo was an active church until the Spaniards deconsecrated (which is different from desecration) it in 1793.  Then when the Texians wanted their independence from Mexico, the famous battle was held at the site, which was pretty much a ruin by then, in March of 1836.  All of the adult male Texians died during the battle, though some women and children survived. One of the primary sources that historians have traditionally used are the reminiscences of Enrique Esparza, who was present for the battle, though he was either six or eight years old at the time.

This is where the “Remember the Alamo” part comes in.  The Battle of the Alamo was such a resounding defeat for the Texians that they went on to win the final battle of the Texas Revolution, the Battle of San Jacinto (“Jacinto” is pronounced, “ja-cin-toe,” not “ha-ceen-to”) in 18 minutes.

Over the intervening years, the locals scavenged the site for building stone, leaving just the church and part of the convento standing.  Texas became a state of the United States on December 29, 1845, and the United States Army rented the church, such as it was, beginning in 1846 (my fingers keep wanting to type “19” instead of “18” for the years.  This is probably a side-effect of typing birth years nearly all day at work).

San Antonio seceded from the Union along with the rest of Texas on February 1, 1861, so that was pretty much it for the presence of the United States Army at that point.  They moved out, then back in after the Civil War.  When Fort Sam Houston was founded in 1876, the Army left the Alamo for good.

The Alamo was used for other purposes for several decades, including as a general store.  The Alamo now belongs to the State of Texas, which appointed the Daughters of the Republic of Texas as caretakers.  In 2011, care of the Alamo was transferred from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to the Texas General Land Office.

The Alamo has another, more odd, bit of history. Moving mature trees is a thing around here.  I don’t think I’d ever heard of that before moving to Texas.  At least in the area where I grew up, if you want a tree in a location, you plant a sapling and wait, but here in San Antonio there are actual companies that exist just to move trees. The first mature tree successfully transplanted in the area is in the courtyard of the Alamo.  They estimate that the tree is around 140 years old and it has been in its current location since it was put there by Walter Whall in 1912.

As you probably know by now, I’m a Chicago girl, and when first found out that I was moving down here, a coworker told me that she had expected the Alamo to be out in the desert (probably thanks to our friend John Wayne), but that it was right downtown.  My frame of reference for “downtown” is tall buildings and big business.  I was picturing it somewhere like Daley Plaza in Chicago. I found the reality to be very different.  The tall-ish buildings part of downtown is a good quarter-mile to half-mile away from the Alamo. The area where the Alamo sits is mostly hotels, actually.  There’s the Menger (five stories), behind it is the Crockett (six stories), and to the north is the Emily Morgan Hotel (13 stories), so if you’re imagining a concrete canyon, don’t.

You will notice that I do not have any photographs of the inside of the Alamo.  This is because the Alamo has a no-photography policy.  There are photographs of the interior available online, if you want to go looking for them, but I have never felt comfortable trying to take pictures there myself.  The Alamo is handicap accessible.  I thought that the exit door had stairs, but after looking at photographs (of the outside), I see that I was mistaken.