Zilker Park and Barton Springs Pool

The springs were here long before Austin. The Tonkawa people who moved through this country treated the waters as special and are said to have held purification rituals here. In the 1700s Spanish explorers built short-lived missions near the springs before moving on toward San Antonio. The water was a landmark and a gathering place from the start.

In 1837 a settler named William Barton bought the springs and the land around them and gave three of the springs the names of his daughters, Parthenia, Eliza, and Zenobia. His name stuck to the place. Decades later a self-made businessman, Andrew Zilker, acquired the land, and in 1917 he sold much of it to the City of Austin, with the springs to be kept as a public park and the money from the sale directed to local schools. That gift is why the park carries his name and why the springs belong to everyone.

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s the city shaped the wild springs into the pool people swim in today, building retaining walls, a bathhouse, walkways, and a dam that formed the long, roughly thousand-foot pool. In 1947 a designer gave the pool its handsome midcentury streamline-moderne bathhouse, with a ticket booth and open-air dressing rooms, and that building now holds Splash, a small free exhibit about the springs, the salamander, and the vast Edwards Aquifer that feeds the water.

What they built is beloved precisely because it stayed natural. The bottom is limestone and grass, not concrete and paint; the water is spring water, not tap water; and swimmers of every age float in it under the open sky. Generations of Austinites learned to swim here. Even the actor Robert Redford is said to have first learned to swim in these springs as a small boy.

The springs are also home to a tiny creature found nowhere else on the planet: the Barton Springs salamander. It lives in and around these waters and depends entirely on the flow and cleanliness of the springs, and in 1997 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as an endangered species, making the pool a federally protected habitat.

That protection shapes how the pool is run. It is cleaned and, at times, closed to keep the salamander's home healthy, and it is a big reason Austinites care so fiercely about the quality of the water and the aquifer that feeds it. When you swim here, you are sharing the water with a species that exists only in this one place, which gives an ordinary dip a surprising bit of wonder.

The pool is the star, but the park around it is worth its own time. Zilker has open lawns for lounging, hike-and-bike trails along the river, botanical and sculpture gardens on the hillsides, and easy access to the Lady Bird Lake trail that rings the water downtown. On a warm day you can swim, dry off on the grassy slope above the pool, and then wander the park for hours.

Come early or late to beat the crowds and the heat, bring a towel and a few dollars for the entrance fee in season, and check whether the pool is open before you make the trip. Between the cold clear water, the big green park, and the little salamander hiding in the springs, Zilker and Barton Springs are Austin at its best, right across the river from downtown.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.