Natural Bridge Caverns

The show cave was built around formations that change from room to room. Because water still drips and flows over them, they keep a luster seen in few caverns and look like wax, though they are as hard as limestone. Among them is a rare type called fried eggs, named for their shape. Development began on March 25, 1962, and the commercial route was laid with half a mile of paved trails, lit by 35,000 watts of indirect lighting, reaching as deep as 260 feet below the surface. Parts of the cave were still being explored.

What the plaque says

Natural Bridge Caverns Discovered March 27, 1960, by four students of St. Mary's University, San Antonio. Named for the rock bridge that marks entrance. Dedicated on August 5, 1964 by Governor John Connally. Of early cretaceous age; still forming. Site of artifacts from 5000 B.C., and human remains at least 8,000 years old; also Indian campsites. 1967

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natural Bridge Caverns — 0.3 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 13 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 — 15 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.
• The Alamo — 20 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• Schoenthal School — 3.4 mi
• Harrison and McCulloch Stage Stop — 7.9 mi
• Site of Geier and Schmid Farm — 8.3 mi
• Schertz — 9.6 mi