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.