About this tour
Not a neighborhood but a thread — the Spanish colonial acequia system, a network of hand-dug irrigation ditches engineered by San Antonio's missions starting in the 1730s, some of it still carrying water today. This drive follows that thread from the oldest standing aqueduct in the United States, down at Mission Espada, north through two half-forgotten colonial-era mill sites, to a surviving stretch of the very ditch that watered Mission Valero's fields, and finally to the point where that 300-year-old engineering fed straight into nineteenth-century industry. It's the connective tissue underneath everything else in this metro — the missions, King William, the mills — made visible for once.