About this tour
Espada is the mission most people skip — the southernmost and most remote of San Antonio's four, a good twenty minutes past San José with no gift shop crowd waiting. That's exactly why it's worth the detour: a small, still-active mission church whose parish families trace back to the original Indigenous converts, a quiet cemetery at the end of the road, and, a mile up the acequia, a Spanish colonial aqueduct still carrying river water to irrigate fields nearly three hundred years after Franciscan friars built it — the oldest structure of its kind still standing and still working anywhere in the United States. This short drive links the church to the engineering that kept it alive.