Site of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Mission - Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission

The mission's fate turned on money meant for the Apaches. Father Mariano Francisco de los Dolores y Viana founded it unofficially in late 1756, with Fathers Miguel de Aranda and Francisco Aparicio in charge. Encouraged by Diego Ortiz Parrilla's favorable report early in 1757, Dolores hoped to bring it under Pedro Romero de Terreros's gift for new missions among the Lipan Apaches. But the site, fifteen leagues from San Antonio, lay outside that field, and the refusal embittered Dolores and Father Alonso Giraldo de Terreros. After San Sabá Mission was destroyed, the friars withdrew in March 1758.

What the plaque says

Site of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Mission - Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission Established on 1756 in the Guadalupe River at or near present New Braunfels as an extension of the ill-fated Mission San Francisco Xavier de Horcasitas (1746-1755). Earlier located 100 miles northeast, San Francisco Xavier had been shaken by attacks, disease, and strife between friars and soldiers, which had climaxed in the murder of a friar in 1752. Although most of the personnel and Indian converts (neophytes) fled, the mission continued until 1755. After that time it moved to the Guadalupe River to gather its scattered Mayeye Indians, who refused to enter Valero Mission (the Alamo) in San Antonio. Like the other three San Xavier missions, San Francisco Xavier was short-lived. Good features at the site included five springs, fertile fields, timber, meadows and the nearby river. Two friars ran the small mission, with a citizen guard, so as to avoid friction. Four Spanish families and 41 Indians (27 of them baptized) comprised the inhabitants of the mission as of January, 1757. Never a strong mission, Guadalupe continued only until March, 1758. At this time the church withdrew its staff because of increasingly dangerous raids by Comanches and other northern tribes. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.3 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 2.6 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 13 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 18 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• New Braunfels Gemischter Chor Harmonie — steps away
• Landa Park — steps away
• New Braunfels — steps away
• Wurstfest — 0.5 mi