San Antonio's Spanish Missions are a collection of Spanish colonial mission buildings around the San Antonio area. There are five under the local park system, plus the Alamo, under Texas state park control.

The Alamo Mission was the site of a famous battle between the Republic of Texas and Mexico; the battle has a lot of historical importance to Texans, and is a state and national landmark. The Alamo is in what is now downtown San Antonio.

The Alamo Mission was only one of several Spanish/Mexican establishments in San Antonio. The Spanish Governor's Palace is a historic museum and site, the former palace of the governor of the local Spanish Tejan colony and later the headquarters of a local garrison. The remaining Palace has been called the "Most Beautiful Building in San Antonio." The Presidio de Bexar is another historic Tejan site, once a Spanish and later Mexican garrison.

The McNay Art Museum, the first modern art museum in Texas, originally specializing in 19th and 20th Century artists, but now with an expanded reach. Featured artists include Cassatt, Cezanne, Gauguin, Hopper, Matisse, O'Keefe, Picasso, and Rivera.

The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum was created when another museum cancelled a contemporary art exhibition in the mid 1980s, and has been rolling ever since. Today Blue Star has contemporary visual arts exhibits and musical performances, and the MOSAIC educational program.

The US Army Medical Department Museum at Fort Sam Houston is just what it sounds like, a museum for medical history in the US Army since 1775, including displays on uniforms, methods, and vehicles.

The Museum of Aerospace Medicine (The Edward H. White Museum of Aerospace Medicine) is at Brooks City Base, formerly Brooks Air Force Base, and showcases a great many photos and exhibits on air and space medicine, relating to pilots, astronauts, and the art of keeping them alive in a thin atmosphere and zero gravity.

The San Antonio Museum of Art collects and exhibits a variety of American art, including pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Latin American, folk art, and a wide variety of other worldwide ancient, historic, and more recent art.

The Witte Museum has a mixed collection on science, Texan natural history (recent and ancient - the museum has dinosaur bone displays), and Texan culture. The Witte includes a great many child-oriented displays and activities, and school oriented education programs. This museum is in downtown San Antonio, near the river, just outside Brackenridge Park, near the zoo.