The Alamo

The Alamo is a former Spanish mission and fortress in the centre of San Antonio, Texas. Founded in 1718 as the Misión San Antonio de Valero and moved to its present site in 1724, it was built to convert local Native American peoples to Christianity. It is famous above all for the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, fought during the Texas Revolution, and has since become a powerful and contested symbol in Texan and American memory. Today it serves as a museum and belongs to the San Antonio Missions World Heritage Site.

In 1718 Martín de Alarcón, the governor of Spanish Texas, led an expedition to found a way station between the settlements on the Rio Grande and new missions in East Texas. Near the source of the San Antonio River he set up a makeshift mission whose name honoured Saint Anthony of Padua and the Marquess of Valero, viceroy of New Spain, alongside a fort and the civilian settlement that grew into the city of San Antonio. The mission sat close to a community of Coahuiltecan people. After a hurricane wrecked its buildings, it moved in 1724 to the spot where it now stands.

The mission grew into a walled compound with a stone residence for the friars, adobe housing and a weaving workshop, and more than 300 converts lived there by 1744. Because the nearby garrison was often undermanned, the mission was built to resist Apache and Comanche raids, and in 1745 mission residents helped drive off an Apache force. A stone church begun in 1744 collapsed in the 1750s; its replacement, started in 1758, was never finished and probably never used for worship. Numbers dwindled, and in 1793 the mission was secularised and soon abandoned.

In 1803 a Spanish cavalry unit from Álamo de Parras in Coahuila occupied the empty compound, and the name Alamo probably comes from this company, or else from the cottonwood trees, álamos, that grew nearby. During the Mexican War of Independence it served as a prison and then as the town's first hospital, and in 1821 it passed to independent Mexico.

In the Texas Revolution, the Mexican general Martín Perfecto de Cos fortified the Alamo but surrendered it to Texian rebels in December 1835. A small garrison under William Travis and James Bowie chose to hold it. On 23 February 1836 a Mexican army led by President Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived and laid siege, and on 6 March it stormed the walls. All or almost all of the defenders were killed, among them Bowie and Davy Crockett, and Santa Anna had their bodies burned. Most historians put Mexican losses at 400 to 600 killed or wounded. When the Mexican army withdrew from Texas in May 1836 after its defeat at San Jacinto, it tore down many walls and set fires across the compound.

Texian and Mexican forces each briefly reoccupied the ruins, which were also plundered for stone. Texas joined the United States in 1845, and during the Mexican–American War the US Army took over the complex as a supply depot, rebuilding the old convent and giving the chapel a roof and its now familiar curved gable. In 1861 Texan militia forced the surrender of the federal commander there, and the Alamo was held for the Confederacy until the end of the Civil War. The army left in 1876, after which the convent became a wholesale grocery.

The state of Texas bought the chapel in 1883. From the 1890s the Daughters of the Republic of Texas campaigned to save the rest, and in 1905 the legislature bought the remaining buildings, largely with money advanced by the heiress Clara Driscoll, and named the society custodian. A feud between Driscoll and her fellow preservationist Adina De Zavala followed, and the upper walls of the long barracks were eventually taken down.

The Alamo became a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and its long barracks were turned into a museum in 1968. Since the 1980s its interpretation has been disputed: Mexican-American activists criticised accounts that ignored Tejano participants, and research found that the plaza covers a burial ground, mostly of Native American and mestizo people. After the state attorney general found that the Daughters had mismanaged the site, a 2011 law moved its care to the Texas General Land Office, which took over in 2015. On 5 July that year UNESCO inscribed the Alamo and four other San Antonio missions as a World Heritage Site.