Milam Park (built over El Campo Santo cemetery)

The story

Every day, hundreds of tourists cut through Milam Park on their way to Market Square for margaritas and mariachi music, completely oblivious to what sits beneath their sneakers. Before the city paved it into a park in 1884, this plot—along with the hospital grounds directly adjacent—was El Campo Santo, San Antonio’s primary early Catholic burial ground. When municipal officials decided to turn the burial site into a civic square, they exhumed a handful of prominent graves, paved over the rest, and left hundreds of early San Antonians resting permanently under concrete walkways and grass.

The park’s namesake, Texian revolutionary commander Ben Milam, was buried here after dying at the Siege of Béxar in 1835. A marker stood over his resting place for decades, but during park renovations in the 1970s, workers moved his statue to another spot in the square, accidentally erasing the marker over his actual grave. For twenty years, the city quite literally lost track of where one of its biggest historical icons was buried.

It wasn't until 1993, when archeologists unpaved the center of the park to prepare foundations for a new pavilion, that they struck bone. Milam’s remains were found directly beneath the footprint of the planned gazebo. City leaders reinterred him with full honors right where they dug him up, meaning every wedding party currently posing under the central gazebo is standing directly on top of a 19th-century revolutionary leader—surrounded by an entire buried cemetery the city never bothered to move.