Who ruled San Antonio?

San Antonio grew up around the springs that feed the San Antonio River in south-central Texas, on the edge between the rolling Hill Country and the coastal plain. Reliable water in a dry land drew hunter-gatherers for thousands of years and then Spanish missionaries and soldiers, who made it the main settlement and capital of Spanish Texas. Its history is defined by that frontier role: a meeting point of Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, Anglo-American and German peoples, and the site of the Alamo, the most famous battle of the Texas Revolution.

The springs and river were long used by bands of hunter-gatherers, among them the Payaya, part of the many small groups the Spanish later grouped as Coahuiltecans; Apache and, later, Comanche raiders also ranged across the region. A Spanish expedition camped by the river on 13 June 1691, the feast of St Anthony of Padua, and named it after him. In May 1718 Spanish officials founded the mission of San Antonio de Valero and the military post, or presidio, of San Antonio de Béxar, to secure the route to the eastern missions of Texas against the French in Louisiana. In 1731 a group of families from the Canary Islands arrived and set up the town council of San Fernando de Béxar, the first civil government in Texas.

Four more missions were built or moved along the river between 1720 and 1731, among them San José, with its carved stone church. Within their walls, Indigenous converts farmed irrigated fields, tended cattle and learned crafts, though disease, raids and the strict mission regime took a heavy toll. In 1772 San Antonio became the capital of the Spanish province of Texas, part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It suffered badly in 1813, when a republican rebellion briefly seized the town before a royalist army crushed it at the nearby Battle of Medina and carried out harsh reprisals.

After Mexico won independence in 1821, Anglo-American settlers poured into Texas. Tension over the authority of the central government and the status of slavery led to revolt in 1835, and in December Texian forces captured San Antonio after a siege. In February 1836 General Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived with a large Mexican army and besieged the few hundred defenders in the old mission of San Antonio de Valero, by then known as the Alamo. On 6 March his troops stormed it and killed nearly all of them, including James Bowie and Davy Crockett. "Remember the Alamo" became the rallying cry when Sam Houston's army defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto in April, securing the independence of the Republic of Texas.

Mexican armies briefly reoccupied San Antonio twice in 1842, but Texas joined the United States in 1845. German immigrants arrived in large numbers from the 1840s, building breweries and the stone houses of the King William district. During the American Civil War Texas joined the Confederacy, though many of the city's German and Mexican residents favoured the Union. The arrival of the railway in 1877 turned San Antonio into a cattle and trading centre, and by 1900 it was the largest city in Texas. Army posts such as Fort Sam Houston and the air training fields established from 1917 made it a major military centre. The HemisFair world's fair of 1968 and the River Walk along the old river channel helped make tourism central to its economy, and in 2015 its five missions became Texas's first World Heritage site. With about 1.5 million people, San Antonio is today the seventh-largest city in the United States.