Mission San Juan Capistrano & the Farm Fields

Every San Antonio mission had a farm — the fields were the whole point, the thing that let a handful of missionaries and converts survive out here at all — but Mission San Juan Capistrano is the only one where those fields still exist. This short walk starts at the 1731 mission church, visits its cemetery, and then heads out to the small demonstration farm and orchard the National Park Service restored on the mission's original acreage, still watered by the same 300-year-old acequia and still farmed today, in partnership with the San Antonio Food Bank, to feed people in the city. It ends at a modern trailhead where a stretch of river the Spanish missionaries would recognize still runs wild. It's a tour about a very old idea that never actually stopped working.