Website Ranks San Antonio Among Top 100 Cities in the World

The 2018 World's Best Cities Report from bestcities.org ranked San Antonio as the 88th best city. Yes, in the entire world.

The report looks at cities with more than one million residents and considers factors such as geographical location, infrastructure, art & culture, diversity and employment.

Apparently, those factors leave San Antonio with a considerably high ranking.

The report found the following:

The genius of San Antonio is that ever since 1941, it has sagely leveraged, grown and enhanced its greatest asset and attraction: the River Walk.

The idyllic pedestrian promenade along the San Antonio River, extended from three to 15 miles in 2013, is a scenic urban lifeline that connects visitors to everywhere they want to be and anchors the city’s #38 ranking for Attractions. On one end of the RiverWalk, there’s the UNESCO World Heritage Alamo site and the five colonial missions, key players in a #61 finish for Culture. On the other, the San Antonio Zoo, and in between, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Texas Golf Walk of Fame, and dozens of other curiosities, eclectic stops and riverside cafés.

We can't deny that. Who doesn't love drinking margs on the River Walk? The Missions already hold their own as a collective World Heritage Site. The zoo – and all of the Brackenridge Park area – leaves little to be desired.

But the report focused on the Pearl, which is loved by San Antonians and tourists alike. Heck, it was even named on a short list of great places in America in 2017. The report continues:

Increasingly, Pearl is a destination within the destination: a mixed-use space in a former brewery, it’s a beguiling blend of retail, dining, offices, a riverside amphitheatre, events and a campus of the Culinary Institute of America. Around the esteemed school, a host of grads and chefs have clustered, creating a smorgasbord of choices from Italian to ’cue to bakery to vegetarian cuisine. There’s the year-round Farmers’ market, the Hotel Emma, the modern reincarnation of a 19th-century brewhouse, and its restaurants, arbiters of local taste. San Antonio ranks #66 in our Culinary subcategory and #54 for Nightlife, a tribute to the wealth of nocturnal options and to the city’s #33 finish for Weather.

Well, there you have it. San Antonio is a city to be reckoned with.

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