El Camino Real

The road was a Native trade route before it was a Spanish one. Indigenous peoples moved goods along these paths for centuries, and Alonso de León's expeditions of 1686 to 1690 and Domingo Terán de los Ríos's in 1691 and 1692 fixed the Spanish corridor. It ran about 2,500 miles from Mexico City through San Antonio and Nacogdoches, crossed the Sabine, and passed through the Neutral Strip and Many to end at Natchitoches. After 1821, American settlers called the Camino Arriba stretch the Old San Antonio Road. A 2004 federal law made it a national historic trail.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Jesup State Historic Site — steps away
  The 1822 army post Zachary Taylor built to hold the Neutral Ground between Louisiana and Spanish Texas, with the one surviving kitchen, a reconstructed officers' quarters and a museum open Friday to Sunday.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 9.5 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.
• North Toledo Bend State Park — 19 mi
  A 900-acre park on the Louisiana shore of the 186,000-acre Toledo Bend Reservoir, with trails, disc golf and cabins, near the flooded sites of Pine Flat and other Sabine Parish communities.
• Natchitoches Historic District — 21 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.

More markers nearby

• Baldwin's Store — 5.7 mi
• Los Adaes — 8.9 mi
• Village of Fisher — 9.1 mi
• The Presidio Nuestra Senora del Pilar de los Adais — 9.2 mi