Spring Lake and the Meadows Center

Spring Lake is where the San Marcos River begins. More than 200 artesian springs rise here from the Edwards Aquifer, discharging an average of 123 million gallons a day, and the river runs 75 miles from them to the Guadalupe. People have lived at the springs for a very long time: digs from 1979 to 1982 found artifacts about 12,000 years old, and the site is counted among the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Spanish explorers found Tonkawa people camped by the river. The springs are a state antiquities landmark, so take nothing.

Edward Burleson bought the headwaters in 1847, and a dam built just below the springs to run his mill created the lake. A. B. Rogers bought the property in 1926; his son Paul opened a hotel in 1928 and put glass-bottom boats on the water. In 1951 the family opened Aquarena Springs, an amusement park with a submarine theater, mermaids, a Swiss sky ride, a rotating 220-foot Sky Spiral and Ralph the Swimming Pig.

Texas State University, then Southwest Texas, bought the park in 1994 and took it apart, the last of it, the submarine theater and the Sky Spiral, in 2012. The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment now runs the lake for research and teaching. The springs are critical habitat for the fountain darter, the Texas blind salamander, the San Marcos salamander and Texas wild rice; the San Marcos gambusia has not been seen since 1983. The glass-bottom boats still run, over springs boiling up through the sand.