Mission San Jose

Founded in 1720, the mission was named for Saint Joseph and the Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo, the governor of the Province of Coahuila and Texas at the time. It was built on the banks of the San Antonio river several miles to the south of the earlier mission, San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo). Its founder was the famed Father Antonio Margil de Jesús, a very prominent Franciscan missionary in early Texas. Mission San Jose is an active parish. Visitors are welcome to attend mass on Sundays. (From the NPS website) This was a wonderful Mission.  This one if referred to as "the queen of the Missions".  It has retained much of it's original wonder.  There are still rooms where the indians lived, still the acequias (irrigation ditches) that kept the fields watered and the grainary working.  There was a restoration project for this Mission after the Franciscans returned to live here in 1931.