Little Alsace: A Castroville Walking Tour

Castroville calls itself 'The Little Alsace of Texas,' and after a half-mile walk through its historic core, you'll understand why. Between 1842 and 1846, French empresario Henri Castro brought hundreds of families — most of them Alsatian, from the disputed borderland between France and Germany — to build a colony on the Medina River, and their steep-roofed limestone cottages still line these streets today. This walk starts at a genuine 17th-century Alsatian farmhouse shipped here from France board by board, then loops past the empresario's own homestead, the county's first courthouse, a bishop's boyhood parish, and a Ranger-scout's house with a chimney that angles clean through the wall. It ends at the Landmark Inn, a stagecoach-era trading post on the old road to the Rio Grande — a fitting close to Texas's most European small town.