This concise and lavishly illustrated account balances the significant history of the San Antonio’s missions’ founding and their original function with the stories of their subsequent decay and eventual restoration. New drawings depict all five mission compounds as they first appeared. Built in the eighteenth century by Franciscan friars and Native American converts, San Antonio’s five missions form the largest such cluster in the United States. One is preserved as the Alamo, the others make up San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.

Celebrated San Antonio historian Lewis F. Fisher, whose Maverick Publishing Company was acquired by Trinity University Press in 2015, has published forty-five books on topics ranging from San Antonio’s Spanish heritage to its urban development, and from the military to sports, architecture, and multicultural legends. A former member of the San Antonio River Commission, he has written numerous books himself, including Chili Queens, Hay Wagons, and Fandangos: The Spanish Plazas in Frontier San Antonio, winner of the 2015 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, and Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage, republished in a second edition, and Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend. Fisher has received numerous local, state, and national writing awards and was named a Texas Preservation Hero by the Conservation Society in 2014.