Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

In San Antonio, it may be the Spanish Governor’s Palace, on the edge of Military Plaza (or what’s left of the Plaza d’ Armas, once the City Hall got plunked down in the middle of it.) But it isn’t a palace at all, not in the commonly accepted sense; just a rather good-sized single-story house of adobe brick, constructed in the 18th century for the use of the captain of the local military garrison … who was therefore about as high an authority as there was in Spanish San Antonio. As to the Spanish part – the place was extensively restored in the 1930s by an architect who had many romantic notions of what it should have looked like, rather than what historical or archeological records suggested. In any case, it’s a rather charming building … and I had been intending to visit for some time. I needed to form a kind of mental landscape for a chapter of The Quivera Trail, where Sam Becker and Jane Goodacre visit Porfirio’s family home for a grand fandango. And Porfirio’s family home would be the old-style Mexican mansion, along about Soledad Street where the Veramendi Palace had been. It would be the same kind of lay-out, with a blank facade onto the street, a grand pair of doors, and a Spanish-style courtyard at the back, with a garden and outbuildings that ran down to the river edge. So we went last weekend, and I took some pictures.