San Antonio built a dome for a football team it did not have - and filled it anyway. The Alamodome at 100 Montana Street, on the southeastern edge of downtown, opened on 15 May 1993 after a 186-million-dollar build intended to boost convention traffic, lure an NFL franchise and give the Spurs a bigger home. The NFL never came, but the 64,000-seat, five-level indoor stadium - expandable to 72,000 - became the city's everything-building: the Spurs played nine seasons here including their first NBA.....

A Mesoamerican temple with a two-ton chandelier survived a century of San Antonio. The Aztec Theatre at 104 North St. Mary's Street opened on 4 June 1926 - 6,000 people mobbed the doors, 3,000 got in - as one of only three theatres ever designed by Meyer and Holler, the firm behind Hollywood's Egyptian and Chinese. Its 1.75-million-dollar interior recreates a Hollywood dream of pre-Columbian splendour: stone warrior statues, vividly painted columns, murals reproducing Mesoamerican artifacts, and.....

On San Antonio's celebrated River Walk, just steps from the Alamo, the Briscoe Western Art Museum is the only major institution in the city dedicated to the art, history and culture of the American West. Opened in October 2013 in the elegantly restored 1930 Hertzberg Library building, the museum was conceived by a coalition of local civic and business leaders, including its namesake former governor, as a long-overdue celebration of the region's frontier heritage. The collection spans roughly tw.....

San Antonio's golden jewel spent a quarter-century dark before a million-dollar gift relit it. The Charline McCombs Empire Theatre at 226 North St. Mary's Street opened on 14 December 1914 inside the eight-story Brady Building, built by developer Thomas Brady on a site associated with the arts since Turner Hall in 1879. St. Louis architects Mauran, Russell and Crowe designed it as a European-style palazzo opera house in Renaissance Revival dress - electric fans, opera boxes at two levels, a copp.....

Elvis and Roy Rogers played it in its first years, and a quarter of a million people came through the gates on the opening day of its first rodeo. Freeman Coliseum, at 3201 East Houston Street just northeast of downtown San Antonio, opened on 19 October 1949 as the Bexar County Coliseum - an Art Deco arena built after county voters passed a 1.75-million-dollar bond in 1945, later named for philanthropist brothers Harry and Joe Freeman who championed its construction. For half a century it was t.....

Beyond its celebrated historic landmarks of the Alamo, the River Walk and the Spanish missions, San Antonio offers a substantial and steadily growing menu of games, indoor entertainment and family activities that fill the city's rainy afternoons and long Texas evenings. Several large entertainment complexes, themed escape-room operators, immersive virtual-reality venues, indoor go-kart tracks, axe-throwing halls and arcade-bars cluster across the city, providing visitors and locals with plenty o.....

The university started a football program from nothing, and the owner of the New Orleans Saints paid for the stadium to hold it. Gayle and Tom Benson Stadium, at 4301 Broadway Street on the University of the Incarnate Word campus in San Antonio, opened on 1 September 2008 - funded by the San Antonio-born NFL owner and his wife, whose gifts also launched the Cardinals football program itself. The venue is a true multi-sport facility: home to UIW football, men's and women's soccer, and track and .....

On the celebrated River Walk in downtown San Antonio, the city's Hard Rock Cafe occupies a prime spot on Crockett Street, just steps from the historic Alamo and the network of restaurants and shops that line the riverbank. The chain's San Antonio location has long been a popular destination among the millions of visitors who flock to the heart of the city each year, drawn by the unique combination of Texan history and the sub-tropical riverside cafe culture that has defined the River Walk since .....

The entire main floor rides on a Gala lift system: overnight, 600 theatre seats sink away and the room becomes a flat-floor hall for 2,100 - one of the most flexible major venues in America. The H-E-B Performance Hall is the centrepiece of the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts at 100 Auditorium Circle on San Antonio's River Walk, opened on 4 September 2014 behind the preserved 1926 facade of the old Municipal Auditorium. The site's history runs deep: the Spanish Mission-style Municipal Audit.....

It was built to throw a party for a city's 250th birthday: the complex opened with HemisFair '68, the world's fair that remade downtown San Antonio, and never stopped hosting. The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, at 900 East Market Street along the River Walk, is today a 1.6-million-square-foot facility hosting more than 300 events and 750,000 delegates a year. The original 1968 complex - exhibit hall, domed arena and theatre, built for 10.9 million dollars on urban-renewal land - anchored .....