The Alamo: Spanish Mission
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The site now known as the Alamo originated in the early eighteenth century as the Mission San Antonio de Valero. At its peak, the mission complex included a chapel and priests' residence or convent plus numerous workrooms, storerooms, Indian houses, courtyards, and fortified outer walls. The chapel, known today as the Alamo shrine, was apparently never completed, but its intended design can be projected from other Spanish provincial churches. Since the earliest known view of the site dates from well into the nineteenth century, all efforts to reconstruct its mission appearance are necessarily conjectural, based on surviving Spanish records. |