— — a city built around a river you walk under.
“The city the San Antonio River walks through. The Paseo del Río runs a level below the streets, lined with cypress and stone bridges. Five Spanish colonial missions trace the river south, the Alamo at the top. The food is its own language: puffy tacos, barbacoa, pan dulce from a bakery that opens at four. Summer is long and bright. The cumbias come on at dusk.
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San Antonio sits in south-central Texas, about 130 kilometres south of Austin, with a population of roughly 1.5 million inside the city limits and 2.6 million in the metropolitan area. The city was founded in 1718 around Mission San Antonio de Valero, later known as the Alamo, and grew along the San Antonio River, which begins from springs at the head of Brackenridge Park and runs south through the limestone of the Edwards Plateau. It is the seventh-largest city in the United States.
Five Spanish colonial missions stand along the San Antonio River and were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015: Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), Concepción, San José, San Juan, and Espada. They were built between 1718 and 1755 from local tufa limestone, carved on site, with espadañas and bell walls that still hold their original bells. San José, the largest, retains its rose window of around 1775. The walls outlast the regime that built them.
San Antonio is reached by San Antonio International Airport, 13 kilometres north of downtown, or Interstate 35 from Austin. The Paseo del Río, opened in stages from 1941 after Robert Hugman's 1929 design, runs roughly 24 kilometres along the river and through the centre of the city. The Alamo is open daily without admission, on Alamo Plaza. The four southern missions are linked by a paved bike path, the Mission Reach, that runs about 13 kilometres south.