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.....

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.....

The quieter half of one of Texas's busiest event campuses, the Freeman Expo Halls supply the square footage that the historic coliseum next door cannot. Located at 3201 East Houston Street on the Bexar County Community Arenas grounds - shared with the 1949 Freeman Coliseum and the Spurs' Frost Bank Center - the expo complex was built in 2007 to bring larger and more diverse trade events to San Antonio. The inventory is straightforward and flexible: four climate-controlled halls totalling about .....

The principal indoor arena of San Antonio, Texas, Frost Bank Center is best known as the long-time home of the city's celebrated professional basketball team and as the region's premier venue for major concerts and events. Opened in 2002 and known for much of its life under previous corporate names, the arena sits on the city's east side and has hosted some of the most memorable moments in local sport, including championship celebrations. The arena seats around eighteen and a half thousand for .....

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 .....

In 1973 neighbours stood between this building and the bulldozers, using their bodies as shields - and won. The Jo Long Theatre for the Performing Arts, the 650-seat mainstage of the Carver Community Cultural Center at 226 North Hackberry Street on San Antonio's Eastside, is the survivor of one of the city's great acts of civil defiance. The building went up in 1918 as a community centre for African-Americans in segregated San Antonio, becoming the Colored Library - renamed the Carver Library a.....

On the historic Commerce Street in downtown San Antonio at the Shops at Rivercenter complex just off the celebrated River Walk, the LiggettVille Adventure Center is a small, family-friendly indoor adventure attraction offering a packed schedule of challenges and activities aimed at children and groups of all ages. Tucked into a 7,000-square-foot venue at the centre of the bustling tourist district, the centre provides a refreshingly active counterpoint to the city's more sedentary historical att.....

A beloved fixture of San Antonio's music scene, Sam's Burger Joint pairs a popular restaurant with an adjoining music hall just north of downtown. Located on East Grayson Street in the historic Government Hill area, the venue has spent years building a devoted following for its blend of classic American food and quality live music, becoming a favoured stop for touring and local acts in a city with deep musical roots. The music hall is an intimate room holding a few hundred people, with a stage,.....

On the north-eastern edge of central San Antonio just east of the Sunken Garden Theater and the Brackenridge Park, the San Antonio Botanical Garden is one of the most beautifully landscaped public gardens in the southern United States. The thirty-eight-acre garden opened in May 1980 after more than a decade of fundraising and planning by the San Antonio Botanical Society and the city's Parks Department, replacing what had been disused dairy farmland on the edge of the Sunken Garden complex. The.....

The Spurs leave town for three weeks every February so two thousand tons of dirt can move in. The San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo, headquartered at the fairgrounds east of downtown, has run annually since 1950 and now draws roughly 1.5 million visitors across its run - one of the largest single events in the city and a fourteen-time PRCA Large Indoor Rodeo of the Year. The event was born of Joe Freeman's 1940s campaign to build a county coliseum for livestock exposition; the Freeman Coliseum o.....