Alamo Mission
— the small stone church a country still walks toward.
Not only on a wall.
“A Spanish Colonial mission church on Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio, founded in 1718 and ruined long before the 1836 siege gave it the name everyone now carries. The famous façade, narrower than visitors expect, is what remains of the chapel. Live oaks shade the plaza, and the city moves around it as if around a held breath.
Alamo Mission, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mission San Antonio de Valero stands on the east bank of the San Antonio River, a few blocks from the downtown river walk in San Antonio, Texas. It was founded in 1718 by Spanish Franciscans as one of five mission complexes along the river. Secularized in 1793, the compound was later used as a military barracks, which is how it came to hold a small Texian garrison in February and March of 1836. The surviving chapel and Long Barrack sit on a roughly 1.7-hectare plaza managed today by the Texas General Land Office.
The chapel is built of soft local limestone quarried from the river bluffs nearby. The much-photographed campanulate parapet on the façade was not part of the original Spanish design; the U.S. Army added it in 1850 to cap the unfinished chapel front, and it has carried the building's silhouette ever since. The walls themselves are roughly 1.2 metres thick at the base. Inside, fragments of the original 1758 carved stone door surrounds survive, weathered by three centuries of Texas sun and limewash. The masons' names are mostly lost.
The Alamo is open daily and admission is free, though timed-entry reservations are required to enter the church itself. The site stands on Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio, easily walked from the River Walk and the historic Menger Hotel next door. The grounds include the chapel, the Long Barrack museum, and a small interpretive garden of native Texas plants. Photography inside the church is not permitted; visitors are asked to remove hats and speak quietly, as the building is considered a shrine to those who died there in 1836.