Roma Historic District

Roma stands on sandstone bluffs at an old river crossing, and for decades it was the head of east-west navigation on the Rio Grande. Steamboats docked here from about 1829 into the 1880s, most of all after 1846, and the town offered a ford, then a ferry, then a bridge. The customs house sits at the highest point on the bluff. Upstream development lowered the river and ended shipping by the 1880s. The landmark nomination calls Roma a rare surviving intact community.

The buildings follow northern Mexican traditions, in sandstone, caliche limestone and molded brick. An 1894 Sanborn map counted 78 major buildings: 43 stone, 27 brick and 8 wood frame. Walled family compounds five to ten feet high line a long plaza. Heinrich Portscheller, a German master builder who worked across the border at Mier, made decorative molded brick and used it for the Nestor Saenz store and the Manuel Guerra residence and store, both of 1884. Roma holds the largest surviving concentration of his work. The district became a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

At the head of the plaza stands Our Lady of Refuge, designed by Father Pierre-Yves Kéralum and built by the Oblates in 1853-56; only its tower is original. The Roma Bluffs World Birding Center, a three-acre bluff garden at 612 Portscheller Street, looks across to Ciudad Miguel Alemán. A 700-foot suspension bridge of 1928, which the landmark nomination calls the last surviving international suspension bridge on the river, stands at the old crossing.