San Antonio's Spanish Missions

These unique photographs portray San Antonio's five Spanish missions, the largest such cluster in the United States. The first was San Antonio de Valero, established in 1718 with the founding of the city of San Antonio and now better known as the Alamo. The others were built along some eight miles of the San Antonio River to the south. San José, founded in 1720, was restored with its enclosed mission plaza during the 1930s. Three moved to San Antonio from East Texas in 1731. Concepción has the nation's oldest intact Spanish-era church and significant remnants of early frescoes. San Juan and Espada have picturesque chapels facing smaller plazas. Espada's mission acequia still flows across its original stone aqueduct. Each section includes a rare nineteenth-century image, some previously unpublished.

Mike Osborne is an artist and photographer based in Austin, Texas. He studied photography at Stanford University and at the University of Texas at Austin. More recently he has been a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan and a resident artist at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. His architectural photographs have appeared in San Antonio Portrait, published in 2005, and in numerous national and international publications.