Mission San Juan Capistrano

This is Mission San Juan, south of San Antonio, Texas. It is the fourth in a string of five missions that are found along a ten mile stretch of the San Antonio River. They were established in the early eighteenth century, this one in 1731. Its full name is San Juan Capistrano, just like the California mission. The last we saw it in the 1990's it had stone buttresses on the side that is visible in the photo and neither they nor the bell tower were whitewashed or painted. It is still used as a church as the insets show. We visited it on a recent trip to Texas and biked the Mission Trail from the Alamo to Mission Espada, the southernmost of the five missions.