Bruni Plaza

The 1767 survey that made Laredo a villa did more than mark a plaza. The Handbook of Texas says the commission laid out San Agustín Plaza, the common lands and eighty-nine porciones, each about half a mile along the river and roughly fifteen and a half miles deep, so every holding reached water. Twenty-three were left unassigned for lack of demand. This block came a century later, set aside by the city council in 1870, which makes it a newer square than the plaque's opening suggests, with a name that changed as Laredo did.

What the plaque says

Bruni Plaza When Juan Fernando de Palacios, Governor of Nuevo Santander, New Spain, designated Laredo as a villa in 1767, he laid out a central plaza as an integral part of the city's plan. During the era of Spanish colonization, the plaza functioned as a place for public meetings, readings of decrees, and corrals for cattle roundups. The land for this park was set aside in city plats by the Laredo City Council in 1870, and designated as a public plaza. From about 1900, it was known locally as Juarez Plaza, named for the organization Sociedad Mutualista Hijos de Juarez that met west of this block. In 1931 the plaza was renamed Bruni Plaza in tribute to prominent Laredo citizen Antonio Mateo Bruni. Born in Italy in 1856, Bruni came to Laredo in 1877 and established a mercantile business. A civic leader, Bruni was elected to the City Council in 1886, and to the County Commission in 1894. His other enterprises included holdings in real estate and ranching. Bruni contributed to the beautification of the plaza, and after his death in 1931, his will provided funds for its care. The site continues to serve as a community gathering place. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Cathedral — 0.5 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• San Agustín Plaza — 0.5 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 0.5 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 1.0 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• Jarvis Plaza — 0.3 mi
• City Hall and Market House — 0.3 mi
• Laredo's Washington's Birthday Celebration — 0.3 mi
• Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church — 0.4 mi