The Alamo

The Alamo is defined by the hump-backed facade at the top of its chapel, a distinctive arched gable that was not part of the original seventeenth-century mission design but was added by the United States Army in the eighteen fifties. Originally established in seventeen eighteen as Mission San Antonio de Valero, the site was meant to convert local Indigenous people to Christianity. It gained its present name from a Spanish cavalry unit that occupied the grounds in the early nineteenth century.