The Witte Museum: 100 years, 10 acres, and 350,000 visitors a year

The Witte opened as the Witte Memorial Museum on October 8, 1926, named for benefactor Alfred G. Witte and championed by Ellen Schulz Quillin, a teacher and botanist who began fundraising in 1923, per the museum's official history. It operated under the charter of the San Antonio Museum Association, established in 1925, a year before the doors opened.

That founding makes 2026 the museum's centennial year, an anniversary few Texas institutions reach. The campus still sits where it opened, in Brackenridge Park along the San Antonio River, and today it covers about 10 acres, per the museum and the Texas State Historical Association.

Between 2007 and 2017 the museum completed a roughly $100 million renovation and expansion, known as the New Witte, which fully opened in 2017 with about 174,000 square feet of new and changed space, per Texas Highways and the American Alliance of Museums.

The result is a modern nature, science, and culture museum that still feels like it belongs to the park around it, with the San Antonio River curving past the campus.

The anchor is the Naylor Family Dinosaur Gallery, where Cretaceous-era Texas dinosaurs and prehistoric marine reptiles, including Acrocanthosaurus, Tylosaurus, and Protostega, tower over visitors, per the museum's Plan Your Visit page. For school-age kids it is often the room they talk about for months.

Beyond the dinosaurs, the museum holds the South Texas Heritage Center, the McLean Family Texas Wild gallery with dioramas of more than 150 Texas species, and the People of the Pecos gallery, which tells 9,000-plus years of Lower Pecos canyonlands history, per the museum and Texas Highways.

Admission is straightforward: adults 19 to 64 pay $17, seniors 65 and older and teens 13 to 18 pay $16, children 4 to 12 pay $11, and kids 3 and under are free, per the official Plan Your Visit page. Bexar County residents get free general admission on Tuesdays from 3 to 6 p.m.

The park around it is free, so a family trip can pair a paid museum morning with a free afternoon in Brackenridge Park, where the zoo and the free Japanese Tea Garden sit within the same green ribbon.

An honest local tip: combine the Witte with the river. The Greenway Trails system runs past the park, the Zoo Train loops between the museum, the zoo, and the tea garden, and the river walk through Brackenridge is at its best in the cooler months of fall and spring.

Weekday mornings are the quietest time for the dinosaur gallery, and the Tuesday 3 to 6 p.m. free window for Bexar County residents is worth planning around if you qualify.

A museum that has outlasted a century on the same block says something about a city's stability and pride. For a relocating family, the Witte is also simply one of the best low-key Saturdays in town: a world-class museum with ticket prices that undercut most big-city counterparts, right inside a free park.

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