Did you the Alamo City has friends and family all over the world? Here’s everything you need to know about San Antonio’s sister + friendship cities.
What is a Friendship City?
Friendship cities are formal relationship building blocks on the road to becoming designated sister cities. The mayor has the power to declare a “Memorandum of Understanding” as a way of opening a path to a friendship city. Our friends include Suzhou, China, Mexico City, Mexico, and Baguio, Philippines.
What is a Sister City?
Becoming “sisters” requires approval from both cities’ respective city councils in order to be official. The international program, Sister Cities International, was created after WWII for economic development, cultural, and technical exchanges between US cities, counties, and states with communities worldwide.
From 1953 on, we’ve made 13 cities around the world our “sisters”, from Kumamoto, Japan, Monterrey, Mexico, to Santa Cruz de Tenerife from the Canary Islands and more.
Here’s the list of our sister cities and when they became official:
- Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, 1953
- Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, April 25, 1974
- Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain, July 24, 1975
- Gwangju, South Korea, October 8, 1981
- Kaohsiung, Taiwan, August 25, 1982
- Santa Cruz de Tenerife, April 14, 1983
- Kumamoto, Japan, December 28, 1987
- Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, February 27, 2008
- Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China, February 16, 2012
- Darmstadt, Germany, October 27, 2017
- Windhoek, Namibia, 2016
- Baguio, Philippines, May 11, 2022
- Querétaro, Mexico, Feburary 11, 2025
Fun fact: San Antonio won the “Sister Cities International 2019 Award for Best Overall Program” for a city population greater than 300,001.
