New book painstakingly recreates the mysterious San Antonio landmark Miraflores
Anne Elise Urrutia’s Miraflores: San Antonio's Mexican Garden of Mystery employs archival photographs, maps, diagrams and a research-driven narrative to offer a virtual tour of the landmark.
https://www.sacurrent.com/arts/new-b...lores-29347449
There's a distinct sense of mystery to Miraflores, the gated green space viewable from Hildebrand Avenue near Broadway.
Evocative of Frances Hodgson Burnett's early 20th-century novel The Secret Garden, Miraflores invites imaginative speculation and has unwittingly welcomed countless trespassers. Many San Antonians who have driven past its ornate gates — which seemingly lead nowhere — have wondered what it is.
But the bigger question lies in what it was.
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Sanctuary in San Antonio
Upon settling in San Antonio, Aureliano Urrutia bought two properties on what would later become Broadway — one for his medical practice, the other for a mansion to house his family of 13. When his wife Luz Fernández de Urrutia died in 1921, he purchased the tract that would become Miraflores.
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Changing hands
In 1962, at the age of 90, Aureliano Urrutia sold Miraflores with a deed that stipulated it would be preserved as "a spot of beauty." As Anne Elise Urrutia details in her book's epilogue, that deed wasn't properly upheld by subsequent owners USAA (1962-1974), Southwestern Bell Telephone (1975-2000) or the University of the Incarnate Word (2000-2006).
"During USAA's ownership of Miraflores, the company encroached on the five-acre garden, converting it to expand their parking lot, and added a small building and a conventional rectangular swimming pool to the southwest quadrant as a recreational area for their employees' children," she writes.
Although Southwestern Bell claimed it would "continue the preservation" of Miraflores, it leased the property to the Telephone Pioneers of America, a volunteer group that proceeded to drain and fill in a large pond, cut down trees, destroy pathways and install a 4,000-square-foot pavilion flanked with barbecue pits and bathrooms. During this period, some of Miraflores' key objects began decaying — and even disappearing.
Within a year of taking ownership, UIW destroyed Dionicio Rodríguez's trabajo rústico fountain that once served as the joyous center of Miraflores.
"Not only did they take it apart, but the city came in and sealed the well that was powering that fountain," Anne Elise Urrutia pointed out during conversation. "That was an artesian well that was drilled 150 feet down."
The university attempted to relocate 14 works of public art and build a parking lot in the garden — both were unsuccessful — but managed to block a nomination that would have placed Miraflores on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Uncertain future
Owned by the City of San Antonio since 2006, Miraflores is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as a State Archaeological Landmark by the Texas Historical Commission. In 2019, the nonprofit Brackenridge Park Conservancy signed a 10-year agreement with the city to manage Miraflores, then commissioned a cultural landscape report that indicates it has "great potential as a restoration candidate."
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Although Anne Elise Urrutia hopes her book will generate interest in a thoughtful and comprehensive restoration of Miraflores, she also wrote it as a living record of sorts.
"What I really wanted to do was show what Miraflores was at the time," she said. "Basically to recreate it in a book just in case it never gets restored."