Japanese Tea Gardens For a Nice Day Trip

The Japanese Tea Gardens, located next to the San Antonio Zoo, is a wonderful place to spend a few some time if you enjoy lush, exotic blooms and plants, as well as koi ponds and a cooling waterfall.

The Gardens were built when the city of San Antonio asked a Japanese man named Kimi Elzo Jingu and his wife to transform an old rock quarry into a Japanese-style garden place in 1915.

To enter the Garden, one can walk under a pagoda style entrance-way which bears the inscription, "Entrance to Chinese Garden," a kind of confusing sign, unless you understand the anti-Japanese feelings that pervaded the United States after the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the forth-coming US involvement in WWII.  From the 1940s until 1983, the city changed the name of the Gardens from the Japanese Tea Garden to the Chinese Tea Garden. 

There are many wheel-chair accessible paths, as well as lots and lots of stone steps to take a person from one part of the garden to another.

The main feature of the garden is the massive stone pavilion. There are picnic tables if you would like to enjoy a snack during your visit, where you can sit and look down to the ponds and over to the waterfall.