The secrets within the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Texas

In San Antonio, my pilgrim’s progress has been impeded by summer’s melancholic glow: milk thistle’s lilac filaments, mustang grapes’ blue-black remnants, mountain laurels mourning blooms long spent.

“Their flowers look like bunches of grapes – they’re a deep purple and they smell like grape Kool-Aid,” says Sarah Neal, founder of Mission Adventure Tours.

The Alamo – part of the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Texas.Credit: iStock

Purple – the Catholic colour of penance and preparation – is an apt hue for this languid, sun-blanched city. Here stands The Alamo, built by Franciscan missionaries in 1718 and famed for the Battle of the Alamo, a critical moment in the fight for Texan independence.

But this mission is merely the tip of a largely concealed iceberg: North America’s largest collection of Spanish Colonial architecture. Strung out along a 17-kilometre stretch of the San Antonio River, and contained within San Antonio National Historical Park, are another four missions: Concepcion, San Jose, San Juan and Espada. Along with The Alamo, an outlying ranch and a system of acequia (irrigation channels), they comprise the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Texas.

The full picture emerges on a trail winding from The Alamo to the most southerly mission, Espada. Founded with the intention of converting Indigenous Americans to Christianity and defending against French invasion from Louisiana, the missions contain remnants of the dwellings, paddocks and granaries that thrived under Spain’s colonial exertions.

Padres still say mass in the churches where those Indigenous Americans – known by the Spanish as Coahuiltecans – were converted. In return for their faithfulness, converts received shelter and protection from unfriendly Apache and Comanche tribes.

Mission Concepcion – America’s oldest unrestored stone church.

“They were caught between a rock and a hard place,” Neal says. “Do we stay native and always be raided, or do we come here, have a little bit of protection, a little bit of food?”

Such stories animate Concepcion, America’s oldest unrestored stone church. Just as Spanish and indigenous cultures were interwoven during colonisation, so their sacred symbolism is entwined in the frescoes adorning the interior walls.

From here, the path traces the river’s western bank to the largest mission, San Jose. Sun filters through the baroque La ventana de Rosa (Rose Window), sculpted in 1775; cloisters shield the convent’s remains.

Downriver, we pedal through an opening in the bastion walls, into which the Coahuiltecan’s homes were built, and come upon the church of San Juan, which began life as a lowly granary. Its white facade is an angelic foil to the slumped ruins encircling it.

On the trail’s final stretch, more recent history is encoded in a lone thornless moraine honeylocust: the tree was planted in tribute to President John F Kennedy, who made a speech here before departing for Dallas, where he was assassinated the next day.

“This is one of the trees from his estate at his [Hyannis Port] family home,” Neal says.

Leaving behind the heat-stunted memorial, we weave through cooling tunnels of mesquite and pecan trees, their foliage jittery with finches, and arrive at our terminus, Espada. On the edge of a grassy plaza stands the church, stripped now of its exterior frescoes and two of the three bells that once dangled from its belfry.

“They still use the bell to call everybody into church,” Neal says.

Mission Espada and the acequia.

Pods from an ancient mesquite tree were once ground into flour for communion wafers, sacraments that committed Indigenous Americans to a European faith. They paid a heavy price: the missions’ camposanto (sacred burial grounds) contain the graves of those lost to foreign diseases. Cleansing ceremonies have been held for them, Neal says, “to release their spirits if they were locked here because of trauma, and let them finally make their peace and go on”.

The sun is nearing its zenith as we cycle to Espada’s outskirts, where a double-arched aqueduct was built in the mid-1700s to assist the acequia’s flow across a creek. Water still courses through it.

“Families’ water rights go back three, four hundred years,” Neal says. “There’s over a hundred miles total of these acequia – and they’re still very much in use.”

Wildlife treasures the effluent, too – a yellow-crested night heron tiptoeing through the burble, a butterfly quivering on the bank. In autumn, the skies will fill with Monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico. Centuries ago, these ephemeral creatures would have viewed from above an irrevocable migration in reverse: colonialism, seeping across New Spain’s northern frontier and into modern-day North America.

THE DETAILS

Mission Adventure Tours’ bike tours from $100. Tours range between 14 and 22 kilometres and visit two to three missions. E-bikes available at extra cost. See mat-tx.com

The writer was a guest of Visit San Antonio and Mission Adventure Tours.