Approximate Location of the Missions
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Approximate location of the Missions San Francisco de Los Neches, Nuestra Senora de la Purisma Concepcion, San Jose de los Nazonis. Established in East Texas by Franciscan missionaries in 1716 for the Christianizing and civilizing of the Indians in the region. Abandoned temporarily due to the French incursions from Louisiana in 1719. Restored by the Marquis of Aguayo in 1721. Removed to the Colorado River in 1730. Permanently placed on the San Antonio River in 1731 and there known respectively as San Francisco de la Espada, Nuestra Senora de la Purisma Concepcion de Acuna, San Juan Capistrano. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This site marks the approximate spot where Franciscan missionaries relocated three East Texas missions to the Colorado River in 1730 before moving them permanently to the San Antonio River in 1731. First founded in 1716 to convert the region's Native peoples, the missions were abandoned during French incursions from Louisiana in 1719 and restored by the Marquis of Aguayo in 1721.
Why it matters
The wandering missions trace Spain's contested effort to hold Texas against French Louisiana by converting and gathering its Native inhabitants.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1700s, the land we now call Texas was a far frontier of the Spanish empire — vast, lightly held, and contested. Spain claimed it, but France, pushing west from its colony in Louisiana, was probing the same forests and river valleys. In that rivalry, missions were as much a strategy as a faith. A cluster of missions could plant Spain's flag, its language, and its church all at once, far from any fort or town.
East Texas in 1716 was Hasinai and Caddo country — settled, agricultural peoples with their own towns, trade, and long-established ways of life. Franciscan friars arrived among them intending to gather them into mission communities, to teach the Catholic faith and Spanish customs. It was, in the friars' own understanding, a work of salvation and civilization; for the Native peoples it meant the arrival of an outside power that would reshape, and often disrupt, the world they already had.
The deep woods and distance from Spanish supply lines made these missions fragile from the start. They depended on soldiers, on pack trains from the south, and on the goodwill of the peoples around them — none of it guaranteed.
People & events
The story on this marker is one of movement. Three missions — San Francisco de los Neches, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, and San José de los Nazonis — were founded in East Texas in 1716. Barely three years later, in 1719, a French push out of Louisiana rattled the whole Spanish presence in the region, and the missionaries pulled back rather than be caught undefended.
Recovery came through a large, deliberate Spanish expedition led by the Marqués de Aguayo, who restored the abandoned missions in 1721 and shored up Spain's hold on East Texas. But the underlying problem — distance, thin support, and the difficulty of sustaining mission life so far from any Spanish center — never really went away.
So the missions moved again. Around 1730 they were relocated to the Colorado River, and in 1731 they were resettled for good on the San Antonio River, where they took new names: San Francisco de la Espada, Concepción de Acuña, and San Juan Capistrano. This spot marks only the approximate place of that in-between stop along the Colorado — the exact 1730 site is not known with certainty.
Its place in the American story
The wandering of these three missions is a small, human-scaled version of a very large story: how Spain tried, and struggled, to hold Texas. Long before there was a United States claim to this land, European empires were drawing lines across it, and the mission was one of Spain's chief tools for turning a claim on a map into a lasting presence on the ground.
It is also a reminder that the American past did not begin with English colonies on the Atlantic. Generations before the thirteen colonies declared independence, Franciscan friars, Spanish soldiers, and Native peoples were already shaping the future of the continent's interior — in Spanish, and often in conflict.
And the ending is remarkable. The three missions that passed through here did not vanish. They still stand on the San Antonio River today, preserved as part of a national park and recognized among the world's treasured historic places — living churches with roots reaching back three centuries to the East Texas woods.
If you visit
Stand here and you are looking at an educated guess, not an X on a map. The marker itself says "approximate," and that honesty is part of what makes the place worth pausing over. Somewhere near this stretch of the Colorado River, three uprooted mission communities paused on a long journey south — but nobody can point to the exact spot.
Let the setting do the work. Picture the difficulty of moving an entire community — people, livestock, tools, and faith — across open country in the 1730s, with no certainty of what lay ahead. This was a way station, not a destination.
If your travels take you on toward San Antonio, this marker gains a satisfying bookend: the missions that once paused near here found their permanent home on the San Antonio River, where you can still walk their grounds. Seen that way, this quiet spot is the middle chapter of a story whose ending you can visit in person.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Marquis of Aguayo
Themes & tags
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