In addition to the world-famous Alamo, located in the heart of downtown San Antonio, four other eighteenth-century Spanish colonial missions have survived the ravages of time and are located southeast of the downtown area at various locations on the banks of the San Antonio River. These four missions are named Concepción, San José de Aguayo, San Juan Capistrano, and Espada. Like the Alamo, they have received an abundance of attention--either individually or collectively--from various writers through the years.

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED: During his 1854 visit to Texas and San Antonio, Frederick Law Olmsted exhibited little interest in the missions individually, but he did devote some attention to them collectively in A Journey through Texas (1857):

The Mission of Concepción is not far from the town, upon the left of the river. Further down are three others, San Juan, San José, and La Espada. On one of them is said to have been visible, not long ago, the date, "1725." They are in different stages of decay, but all are real ruins, beyond any connection with the present--weird remains out of the silent past.(155)

SYDNEY LANIER: Sydney Lanier was more favorably impressed by the missions than Olmsted had been two decades earlier. He especially liked Mission Concepción, which was occupied by a German family at that time, and he also admired Mission San José, located further down the San Antonio River. Lanier noted that religious services were still being regularly conducted at Mission San José, and he romantically reflected that

one could do worse things than to steal out here from town on some wonderfully calm Sunday morning, and hear a mass, and dream back the century and a half of strange, lonesome devout, hymn-haunted and Indian-haunted years that have trailed past these walls. (243)

Lanier even mentioned little Mission San Juan Capistrano, situated a few miles further down the river, but he only observed that it was in a state of dilapidation. If Lanier knew about the fifth mission, the even more distant Espada, he did not include it in his discussion.

OSCAR WILDE: While he was in San Antonio during June 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Mission San José and seemed particularly impressed with its magnificent façade. He described the "door and window of the San Jose mission the finest he had seen in America" (Lewis and Smith 365). Of course, the window he was referring to was the famous Rose Window, located on the south side of the mission church, around which a variety of legends have circulated through the years; they focus principally on its supposed creator, Pedro Huizar. The appeal of this mission and other San Antonio landmarks remained with Wilde, even after he left the city, because he made the following comments a few days later to a reporter for the New Orleans Picayune:

There are in Texas two spots which gave me infinite pleasure. These are Galveston and San Antonio. . . . It was in San Antonio, however, that I found more to please me. . . . Those old Spanish churches, with their picturesque remains and dome and their handsome carved stonework, standing amid the verdure and sunshine of a Texas prairie, gave me a thrill of strange pleasure. (Lewis and Smith 366)

STEPHEN CRANE: In 1895, Stephen Crane made some collective comments about the missions, much as Olmsted had done in 1857. Crane's observations, however, were decidedly more somber:

Upon the gently rolling plains the mission churches with their yellow stone towers outlined upon the sky called with their bells at evening a multitude of friars and meek Indians and gleaming soldiers to service in the shadows before flaming candles, the solemn shrine, the slow-pacing, chanting priests. And wicked and hopeless Indians, hearing these bells, scudded off into the blue twilight of the prairie. (Crane 37)

Crane followed up this imaginative reconstruction of mission life with a descriptive observation that "the ruins of these missions are now besieged in the valley south of the city by indomitable thickets of mesquite" (37). Because Crane was seeing the missions before modern restoration took place, he lamented their sad appearance:

SANDRA CISNEROS: A century after Stephen Crane's reflections, Sandra Cisneros, in the short story "Bien Pretty," from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), had her first-person narrator allude to the establishment of the missions from a less sympathetic perspective:

A month hadn't passed since I unpacked the van, but I'd already convinced myself that San Antonio was a mistake. I couldn't understand how any Spanish priest in his right mind decided to sit right down in the middle of nowhere and build a mission with no large body of water for miles. I'd always lived near the ocean. I felt landlocked and dusty. Light so white it left me dizzy, sun bleached as an onion. (143)