The Best Things to Do in San Antonio Besides the River Walk

This is the answer, and it is free. The National Park Service describes the park as the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Texas, and it protects four mission communities, San Jose, Concepcion, Espada and San Juan. Concepcion holds the oldest unrestored stone church in the country. No entrance pass is required at any of them.

The visitor center is at Mission San Jose, where rangers run free guided tours through the day, and a hike and bike trail connects all four missions back to downtown. Most visitors give it an afternoon. It deserves a day, and it is a different city down there from the one the River Walk shows you.

The Pearl Brewing Company shut down and the site became the most successful piece of adaptive reuse in Texas. Hotel Emma occupies the old brewhouse, the rest is chef led restaurants, independent shops and music venues, and none of it feels like a mall even though it easily could have.

Come on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, which is stricter than most. Vendors must be inside a 150 mile radius of San Antonio and must grow, raise or make everything they sell, so what is on the tables is actually South Texas. Sunday swaps in local artisans, and there are night markets on Wednesday evenings in spring.

Alamo Cement dug limestone out of this hole from 1880 until 1908 and then left a pit next to the park. Between July 1917 and May 1918 parks commissioner Ray Lambert turned it into a garden using prison labour, adding walkways, stone arch bridges, an island and a pagoda, and the city's own history puts the total spend at about seven thousand dollars.

The Jingu family moved in as caretakers in 1926 and were evicted in the 1940s amid anti Japanese sentiment, after which the city renamed it the Chinese Tea Garden. It was rededicated under its original name in 1984. It is now a Registered Texas Historic Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is the best free half hour in the city.

The Witte is the museum to pick if you have children, and it is good enough to carry adults on its own. The Naylor Family Dinosaur Gallery covers animals of land, sea and sky from the Cretaceous period more than 110 million years ago, in what is now Texas, and the McLean Family Texas Wild Gallery runs more than 150 Texas animals across the state's regions.

It also runs rock art tours to the Lower Pecos, which is the most interesting thing any Texas museum does, and it is marking its first hundred years with an exhibition on its own history. Check the day's hours on the site, because the museum posts them day by day rather than as a fixed weekly schedule.

The museum sits in old brewery buildings on the river's Museum Reach, which means you can walk to it from the Pearl along the water rather than through traffic. Admission is twenty four dollars for adults, nineteen for seniors and military, fourteen for students, and free for children twelve and under.

The part worth knowing is the free access. Bexar County residents with proof of residency get in free on Tuesdays from 4 to 7 p.m. and on second Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon, and the museum runs a three dollar Museums for All rate for SNAP cardholders. Few museums this size are that open about it.

Adult admission runs eighteen dollars Monday to Thursday and twenty two Friday to Sunday, with children three to thirteen at thirteen and fifteen, under threes free, and a reduced rate for students and military. Flex tickets let you pick any day. Parking on site is free, which downtown attractions cannot say.

The Family Adventure Garden and its splash area are the reason to bring small children, and the seasonal programming is genuinely different each quarter, from the Jardin de las Catrinas around Dia de los Muertos to the winter light show. The garden's own pages list two slightly different schedules, so confirm the closing time for the day you want.

Market Square is three blocks of covered market and plaza west of downtown with more than a hundred locally owned businesses in it, selling Mexican food, crafts and the kind of souvenir you do not mind carrying home. It runs live entertainment and family events through the year.

Be clear eyed about it. Parts of it are built for visitors and priced that way, and the food inside ranges from very good to very ordinary. It still earns a slot because nothing else downtown gives you that density of independent sellers in one place, and it is free to walk through.

This is the day trip that justifies renting a car. The Discovery Tour runs about seventy five minutes and takes you down to a ballroom a hundred and thirty feet below the surface, the Hidden Wonders Tour runs about seventy, and a combo ticket covers both caverns at a discount. Lantern tours and advance booking adventure tours go further in.

Above ground there is a zipline and ropes course, a maze, gem and fossil mining and a ranch roundup, which is more theme park than cave but keeps a family occupied for the afternoon. Tours depart frequently through the day rather than on a published timetable, so call for the current schedule.