20 useless facts about San Antonio you can use to impress out-of-towners
When playing tour guide for visiting friends and family, there's plenty of culture and history in San Antonio to draw from. But sometimes you want to take things up a notch.
To that end, we rounded up these quirky and lesser-known facts about the Alamo City, covering everything from cryptozoology to the world's largest tamalada. They're guaranteed to impress your out-of-town visitors.
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saparksandrec
San Pedro Springs Park is the second oldest park in the U.S., and the oldest in Texas.
During the Civil War, it was used as a camp for prisoners of war. Today you’ll find the San Pedro Library, a swimming pool, a skate park and hiking trails.
Photo via Shutterstock / FotosForTheFuture
You can actually take the stairs at the Tower of the Americas.
It’ll only take you 952 steps to reach the top of the 750-foot-tall structure.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons /
Carol M. Highsmith
The dirt at the SA Stock Show & Rodeo is the same 2,160 tons of dirt that’s been used since 1988.
It’s sifted through, of course.
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schraderfotowerks
Tom Slick, the founder of Southwest Research Institute and Texas Biomedical Research Institute, was fascinated by cryptids.
Slick went on expeditions to investigate both Bigfoot and the Yeti in the '50s and early '60s. Artist Elizabeth Carrington took inspiration from Slick's passion for cryptozoology for her public artwork Nessie, a statue of the Loch Ness Monster in Tom Slick Park.
Photo by Jaime Monzon
San Antonio’s Martin Luther King Jr. March is the largest in the country.
Katherine Stinson, the namesake for Stinson Middle School, was the fourth woman to receive a pilot’s license in the U.S.
Stinson, who lived in San Antonio in the early 1900s, set flying records for distance, endurance and aerobatic maneuvers. Stinson Municipal Airport is named after her family, full of pilots, and is the second oldest general aviation airport in the country.
Photo via Shutterstock / Kit Leong
San Antonio is home to the oldest church in Texas — the San Fernando Cathedral.
Facing downtown’s Main Plaza, this structure built between 1738 and 1750 was considered the city’s geographical and cultural center. In addition to being the oldest continuously functioning place of worship in San Antonio, it’s also one of the nation’s oldest cathedrals.
Photo by Sanford Nowlin
There's a gravesite honoring a U.S. Cavalry horse at Ft. Sam Houston.
Located on the northwest side of Ft. Sam Houston near the Westfort neighborhood is a single, large grave, where the beloved Pat the Horse is buried. Pat was a cavalry horse in the U.S. Army in the early 1900's. When the army decommissioned its cavalry, Pat was in his 20s and was set to be euthanized, but the soldiers at Ft. Sam Houston lobbied Washington for him to be spared. The request was approved and Pat spent his retirement at the fort. When Pat died at the ripe old age of 45 he was honored with a grave with his portrait on the headstone.
Photo courtesy of Gatorade
Gatorade was invented by Robert Cade, who grew up in San Antonio.
Cade was born in the Alamo City and went to Brackenridge High School.
Photo via Shutterstock / MACH Photos
San Antonio is home to the World's Largest Cowboy Boots.
Made by the larger-than-life artist Bob "Daddy-O" Wade, these boots were installed at North Star in 1979 and officially made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the World's Largest Cowboy Boots four decades later.