Landa Park

The park's springs shelter two protected animals, the endangered fountain darter and the threatened San Marcos salamander, in water rising from the Edwards Aquifer along the Balcones Fault. Artifacts show the site was a favored campground long before settlement. After its 1936 purchase the city added forty-two acres of Panther Canyon, just above the headwaters, where a test well monitors the aquifer, and in 1984 thirty acres from the Lower Colorado River Authority. Landa Park became a registered arboretum in 1981, with about ninety-six species of trees along its trails.

What the plaque says

Landa Park Joseph Landa purchased the land that now encompasses this park in 1859. The Comal Springs, the largest group of springs in the American Southwest, are the focus of the park. Landa used the Comal River to power gristmills, cotton and woolen factories, an ice plant and a brewery. During the Civil War, a saltpeter processing plant was also located on the site. Joseph's son Harry Landa opened Landa's Park as a tourist site in 1898, when the International and Great Northern Railroad built a spur to the site. By 1900, both the I&GN and the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) railroads ran weekend excursion trains to the park, where visitors enjoyed picnics, dancing and steamboat excursions on Landa Lake. Landa later sold the park to a San Antonio investment group, who operated it until financial problems caused the park's closure in 1933. In 1936, concerned citizens led by Erhard P. Nowotny petitioned the City of New Braunfels to purchase the park, and city residents voted three to one in favor of the move. The park has remained open to the public since that time. Throughout the years the park has grown in acreage, and many improvements have been made. In the 1930s, Works Progress Adminstration (WPA) employees built concession stands, restrooms, parking areas, and retaining walls. Later improvements have included a miniature golf course, playgrounds and nature trails. Wurstfest, an annual celebration of food and music, has been held in the park each November since the early 1960s. Today, Landa Park continues to serve the public as a leisure destination both for the citizens of New Braunfels and for area travelers. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.2 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 2.6 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 13 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 18 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• New Braunfels Gemischter Chor Harmonie — steps away
• New Braunfels — steps away
• Site of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Mission - Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission — steps away
• Wurstfest — 0.4 mi