“People are drawn to the Camino because of its staying power,” says Beth Jusino, author of Walking to the End of the World: A Thousand Miles on the Camino de Santiago. In 2017 alone, over 300,000 hikers, known as “peregrinos,” or pilgrims, completed the trek to Santiago. The National Park Service started planning for El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail in 2006 with a comprehensive management plan.The trail has been walked since the early ninth century, hosting kings and queens, Roman armies and legions of Catholic pilgrims, but in recent years it has attracted an ever increasing and diverse crowd. Bush signed into law El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail. A few years later, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed granite milestones every 5 miles along the route to mark it. Zivley was commissioned to make the study.
#CAMINO REAL PROFESSIONAL#
In 1915, the Texas Legislature appropriated $5,000 to survey and mark the route, and professional surveyor V. Interest in the road revived in the early 20th century. It was one of several named El Camino Real, or "Royal Road", that connected the Spanish possessions in North America with Mexico City. El Camino Real de Los Tejas was first followed and marked by Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 1700s. For centuries, the Native Americans had used the trail routes for trading between the Great Plains and Chihuahuan Desert regions and essentially created the road. The ferry remained in service until being replaced by the Gaines-Pendleton Bridge in 1937.Įl Camino Real marker in Cotulla in La Salle County in South TexasĪfter crossing the river, the trail went through the Neutral Strip and Many, Louisiana, before ending at Natchitoches in modern Louisiana. Gaines sold the ferry in 1843 and at some point it began to be called Pendleton's Ferry.
James Taylor Gaines purchased the ferry in 1819, and it became known as the Gaines Ferry. The river crossing was a ferry, in use since around 1795, as the Chabanan Ferry. The historic trail ran from the capitol and central Viceroyalty of New Spain - present day Mexico City - winding through Saltillo, Monterrey, Laredo (on the modern Texas border), San Antonio, and Nacogdoches, before reaching the Louisiana border at the Sabine River. The growth of towns such as Austin, Galveston, and Houston not on the original route, along with the building of railroads, changed the direction of travel and trade and the use of El Camino Real de los Tejas diminished. A section of the road called Camino Arriba by the Spanish became known as the Old San Antonio Road. Īfter Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, immigrants from the American colonies invited to Texas used the corridor to travel to their settlements. San Antonio de Bexar, founded in 1718, was the first of many communities built as way stations on the trail. The route was refined in 1691-1692 by Domingo Terán de los Ríos, the first governor of Spanish Texas, in an effort to make better connections to the Spanish missions in East Texas.
El Camino Real de los Tejas routes in Spanish TexasĪlonso de León, Spanish governor of Coahuila, established the corridor for what became El Camino Real de los Tejas in multiple expeditions to East Texas between 16 to find and destroy a French fort near Lavaca Bay, established by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on what de León considered to be Spanish lands.
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