San Antonio is a city in south central Texas along with the seat of Bexar County. The cultural along with commercial center for the Río Grande Valley, San Antonio is renowned for its Spanish heritage as well as its unique blend of Mexican, Anglo, and also German cultures.
The city is situated in an area of rolling hills on the San Antonio River and also San Pedro Creek, which issue from springs within the city. The streams bubble forth from the huge Edwards Aquifer, San Antonio's only source of water, which collects rainwater from the Texas Hill Country to the northwest and also channels it underground through porous limestone. San Antonio features a tropical climate, with scorching summers and also mild winters. Temperatures in July average a high of 35° C (95° F) and a low of 24° C (75° F); January averages a high of 16° C (61° F) and a low of 3° C (38° F). Precipitation is plentiful, about 790 mm (about 31 in) falling annually, much of it in summer.
In 1691 Spanish explorers named the San Antonio River for Saint Anthony of Padua because they first encountered it on the saint's feast day. The city itself expanded out of the Royal Presidio of San António de Béjar, a fortified settlement founded in 1718. It was created to protect the Mission San António de Valero founded concurrently. The mission soon became nicknamed the Alamo; along with because of the role it played in the Texas Revolution (1835-1836) has become San Antonio's premier landmark and also a shrine to Texas independence.
The site of San Antonio was long inhabited by the Coahuiltec Native American people and would later be a transition zone for the Plains peoples, like the Apache as well as the Comanche. Permanent European settlement began in 1718. In that year, Spaniards developed the mission of San António de Valero and also the presidio (a fortified community) of San António de Béjar on opposite banks of the upper San Antonio River. The mission of San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, now often referred to as Mission San José, was established nearby in 1720. By 1731 three other missions were operating within the river valley south of Mission San José. In that same year a group from the Canary Islands arrived, persuaded by the Spanish to move to the frontier, as well as developed a community named Villa de San Fernando. Later this community was consolidated with the presidio and also with the small settlement that had developed across the earliest mission to form the community of San Antonio.
During much of the 18th century, the San Antonio area was dominated by Mission San José, which flourished as among the most prosperous along with influential missions in Texas. Then, in 1793, nearly all the missions in Texas were secularized and also most of the mission buildings in the San Antonio area were abandoned. However, the community of San Antonio remained the principal settlement in Texas during the years that Texas was under Spanish, and then Mexican, rule.
San Antonio was incorporated as a city in 1809. In 1813 during the Mexican War for Independence the city was briefly freed from Spanish rule, but was quickly reconquered by Royalist forces. It remained a center of Spanish Texas until Mexican independence in 1821, and also then was the center for Mexican Texas. In the Texas Revolution, Texas troops seized the town in December 1835, but General Antonio López de Santa Anna recaptured the city with the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836 (see Texas: Texas Revolution). Reclaimed with the end of the revolution in April, San Antonio was chartered in 1837 as the seat of Bexar County.
After Texas entered the Union in 1845, the city enjoyed rapid growth as the servicing along with distribution center for the western movement of settlers. In 1860 its population was the largest in Texas, with German immigrants outnumbering both the Anglo as well as Hispanic populations. The city served being a Confederate depot in the American Civil War (1861-1865). But lacking a port or complex transportation network, the city's economic importance was limited until the coming of the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad in 1877. Thereafter it emerged quickly as the shipping along with manufacturing center of southern as well as western Texas.
Until 1910 most of the new immigrants to the area were Anglos from southern states, and also the city expanded to around 70,000 inhabitants. The pattern changed with the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), which initiated an influx of new settlers from Mexico into the Río Grande Valley. The atmosphere of the city began to change from one of a Spanish setting to one of Texas-Mexican culture. San Antonio prospered through the world wars of the first half of the 20th century through the concentration of major military bases around the area.
The advent of the automobile allowed San Antonio citizens to migrate towards the north as well as away from the downtown. The migrations heightened tensions around the 1920s as well as 1930s between a rising Hispanic population, located mostly on the west side of the city, and the more affluent Anglo suburbs. The lack of high paying manufacturing jobs and also the reliance on government along with tourist industries kept San Antonio in the bottom tier income in comparison to other cities in the state, and also the difference in Anglo and also Hispanic incomes heightened the ethnic tensions. One result was reluctance on the part of Anglo leadership to undertake urban renewal and also flood control projects for the downtown areas. Floods in 1921 killed nearly 50 people, and also lesser but important ones around the latter part of the decade also caused damage. In response, the federal government, as part of jobs-creating programs throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s, paid for the construction of the Paseo del Rio (which aided flood control), renovated the missions, along with started other urban renewal projects.
Renewal projects were expanded at the 1960s, as Hispanics began the domination of San Antonio politics and as tourism became the most leading segment of the area's economic well-being. Two major events in this ongoing process were the receiving of federal funds for HemisFair, a world's fair that highlighted San Antonio and also its downtown area and culture, and the election in 1981 of Henry Cisneros, the first Hispanic mayor of a major American city. These events demonstrated the importance of cleaning up and also reconstructing the downtown and also signified the political accommodation of Anglo and also Hispanic politicians.
San Antonio still faces complicated economic problems. In 1995 a federal commission voted to close Kelly Air Force Base, site of the economically essential Air Logistics Center, as part of a nationwide consolidation program. An even more far-reaching problem is the fragility of the city's water supply. The Edwards Aquifer, the main source of water for the metropolitan area, is being depleted through overuse along with periodic spells in which rainfall is insufficient to recharge it. Meeting the many residential, industrial, along with agricultural demands on the water source may do much to shape the future of San Antonio in terms of both population growth and also manufacturing expansion in surrounding areas.
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