Texas is reconsidering the conventional narrative of the Alamo, which ladled myths around the white slaveholders who resisted Mexico. Guess what? The truth is controversial.

Travelers, drawn as we are to ancient and important places, often stumble into historical quagmires rife with competing narratives of exactly what happened and why. I am sure every traveler has at onepoint thought: “If this is history, I want to know who wrote it.”

Our story on the Alamo’s contested and convoluted historical narrative digs into how a deadly 1836 conflict is memorialized and why it matters today.

“A complex argument of facts versus fiction, right versus wrong, and what the battle was even about hasn’t let up since,” writes Nat Geo’s Jenn Barger. “Now, an ambitious plan to restore and recalibrate the UNESCO World Heritage Site has spurred a new battle over how to remember the Alamo.”

There’s a historical origin to Barger’s article: She began researching it decades ago, when she was growing up in San Antonio (and referred to the 18th-century Spanish mission as “the ‘Mo”).

“It’s hard to explain to an outsider how central the Alamo is to San Antonio life. The legend of the battle, which helped Texas gain freedom from Mexico, that iconic humped shape of the building, and the fact that everything in my hometown is this two-step between Texan and Latino culture.”

The site’s history was complicated long before rock star Phil Collins— who had amassed what is reputed to be the world’s most extensive collection of Alamo artifacts—donated his treasures (including what is supposedly Davy Crockett’s shot pouch) to a proposed on-site museum.

For Barger, reporting the story became a saga of its own. “I slipped down a rattlesnake hole of politics, history, and wacky lore. It made me look at everything in a new light,” she says. “I hope this ambitious new plan at the Alamo makes the place more interesting—and also more truthful about why both Mexicans and Texans were willing to die here. The Lone Star State loves a tall tale, but this is no Arthurian legend.”