Founded in 1731 by Spanish Catholics of the Franciscan Order, on the eastern banks of the San Antonio River in present-day San Antonio.
General Information
Overview
Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded in East Texas in 1716 and moved to San Antonio in 1731, is the most modest and least-restored of the four mission sites in San Antonio Missions National Historical Park — and that's part of its appeal. Its farmland was never as productive as its sister missions', so the community stayed small, and an ambitious larger church begun around 1760 was never finished for lack of labor. What survives instead is a smaller working chapel and, notably, most of the mission's original stone courtyard and square, giving visitors an unusually authentic look at a mission's actual floor plan.
After secularization in 1794 the site was largely neglected until archaeologists and WPA-era crews uncovered its foundations in the 1930s, with reconstruction following in the 1960s. It has been part of the National Park Service since the 1980s, while the Archdiocese of San Antonio still maintains the active parish church.
Things to Do
Walk the Original Courtyard
Most of the mission's stone square survives within the courtyard walls, offering a rare, largely unreconstructed view of a mission's true layout.
See the Unfinished Church Foundation
Look for the remains of the larger church begun around 1760 but never completed — a reminder of how modest this mission's resources were compared to its neighbors.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mission San Juan Capistrano (Texas)", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
