El Sal del Rey

The lake still looks like a salt flat. It covers roughly 380 acres, runs several times saltier than the sea, and draws brine shrimp that feed hundreds of long-billed curlews. Cart tracks from the old salt trade are still visible on undisturbed ground, because spilled salt poisoned the soil beneath them. The Campbell family ranched around the lake for about forty years until selling the land to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1992. It now belongs to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and the pink color of its water comes from algae.

What the plaque says

El Sal del Rey (The Salt of the King) Directly to the north. Upon Spanish discovery, 1746, claimed for King, under old law that salt was money. People of wide area got salt here. 1863-64 works aided Texas in the Civil War. Later disputes over El Sal del Rey established Texas laws for private ownership of minerals. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of South Texas History — 16 mi
  Edinburg's regional museum, begun in 1967 in the 1910 Hidalgo County jail and now telling the Rio Grande's story from fossils and native peoples through steamboats to the 20th century.
• Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park — 30 mi
  A 587-acre stand of Rio Grande woodland near Mission, once part of a Spanish porción, given to the state by the Bentsen family in 1944 and now headquarters of the World Birding Center.

More markers nearby

• Bazán and Longoria Murders — 3.5 mi
• Great Salt Lake — 10 mi
• Lasara — 11 mi
• McAllen Ranch — 15 mi