Day Trip From Houston: Victoria and Goliad, Texas
Everybody in Houston has the same short list of day trips: Galveston, Kemah, Brenham, Round Top. Fine places. Also places where you will spend twenty minutes looking for parking behind four thousand other people who read the same list.
Point the car southwest instead. Two hours down US-59 sits Victoria, a town that has had the same public square since 1824. Half an hour past that is Goliad, which has a Spanish fort that flew nine different flags and a mass grave bigger than the one at the Alamo. We hit all seven of these stops on our way down to the coast at Christmas, and every one of them is doable in a single day from Houston if you leave early and don’t dawdle over breakfast.
The drive is about 129 miles to Victoria, roughly two hours on 59/I-69 if Houston lets you out of the house, then another 30 minutes southwest on 59 to Goliad. Flat, easy, boring in the good way. Gas up the night before and go.
Victoria: Start at the Square
DeLeon Plaza
DeLeon City Plaza has been Victoria’s town square since 1824, which makes it older than the Republic of Texas by a comfortable margin. There’s a gazebo, an amphitheater, a row of flagpoles, enormous live oaks, and a statue of the De León family who founded the place. Park here, walk the square, get your bearings.
It also has public restrooms, which is not a glamorous thing to put in a travel post but is exactly the thing you want to know two hours from home with kids in the back seat.
The Nave Museum
A few blocks from the plaza, the Nave Museum is a small art museum in a 1932 neoclassical building, six columns across the front, built as a memorial to local painter Royston Nave. I’ll be straight with you: it’s small, and the exhibition rotates, so what you get depends on when you show up. It’s a good twenty or thirty minutes and it’s not the reason you drove down here. Go anyway, because it’s three blocks from the square and free parking is the least of your problems in Victoria.
The Easter Island Heads
Now the good part. Somebody in Victoria decided the South Texas prairie needed concrete moai, and then made it happen. Five of them, standing in a field, staring at the traffic. The man behind it was a local eccentric who reportedly worked from a stack of library books, which is the most admirable sentence in this entire post.
Here’s the part that still bugs me: between our visits, two of them disappeared. These things weigh seven tons apiece. Somebody moved seven-ton statues out of an open field in rural Texas and nobody seems to know where they went. If you know, the comments are right down there.
The Prairie In Between
Fannin Battleground
About nine miles east of Goliad, right off 59, the road passes an open field with an obelisk in the middle of it. That field is where the Battle of Coleto was fought on March 19 and 20, 1836. Colonel James Fannin was retreating from Goliad toward Victoria on Sam Houston’s orders when General José de Urrea’s cavalry caught his roughly 350 men in the open, with the tree line 400 yards away and no water.
They formed a square and held off three assaults. Overnight the Mexican army brought up artillery and reinforcements, and in the morning Fannin’s men voted to surrender, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war and paroled home. The Handbook of Texas lays out how thoroughly that belief was misplaced.
There is almost nothing here: some interpretive panels, the obelisk, a lot of grass. Give it half an hour. Knowing what happens next is what makes it worth stopping.
Goliad
Presidio La Bahia
The Spanish put Presidio La Bahia on the banks of the San Antonio River in 1749 to keep an eye on the French. It went on to fly nine different flags and take part in six wars and revolutions, which is a workload no other building in Texas can match. Texian rebels seized it in 1835 and renamed it Fort Defiance. Its chapel, Our Lady of Loreto, has been holding services since the 1700s and still does.
It’s also the birthplace of Ignacio Zaragoza, the general who won the battle that Cinco de Mayo is actually about, a fact that surprises roughly everyone who orders a margarita on May 5th.
The walls are restored, you can walk the courtyard and the barracks and the museum, and if you want to go all in, they rent out the Quarters and you can sleep inside a 1749 Spanish fort. That’s not a day trip anymore, but file it away.
Fannin Memorial Monument
A short walk from the fort is the reason you came. After the surrender at Coleto, Fannin’s men were marched back here and held in the chapel. Urrea wrote to Santa Anna asking for clemency. Santa Anna went around him, ordered the commander at Goliad to carry it out, and on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, the prisoners were marched out in three columns and shot. Somewhere north of four hundred men died that morning. The full account is worth reading before you go.
The bodies were burned and left. The pink granite shaft standing over them today only exists because a troop of Boy Scouts turned up bones in the dirt in the 1930s and somebody finally did something about it.
Everyone remembers the Alamo. More men died here. Most days you will have the place entirely to yourself, which tells you something about how history gets remembered and something else about how it gets marketed.
Goliad County Courthouse
End on the square in town. The Goliad County Courthouse went up in 1894, Second Empire, gray limestone with red trim, clock tower in the middle, and it has an identical twin up in Lockhart. The architect is disputed, which is a polite way of saying two different men’s names are attached to it and the paperwork does not settle the argument.
The big oak on the north lawn is beautiful and has an ugly history. Read the marker.
If You Have More Than a Day
Everything above fits in one long day from Houston. If you’d rather stretch it into a weekend, keep going southeast: Port Lavaca is another 45 minutes from Victoria and puts you on the water, and Corpus Christi is about an hour past that. We wrote up that whole stretch separately in Things to Do in Corpus Christi and the Coastal Bend, which covers the pier, the aircraft carrier, and a two-story Whataburger.
But if all you’ve got is a Saturday, Victoria and Goliad will fill it, and you’ll be the only person at your next cookout who has stood on the ground where the other massacre happened.
