San Antonio

Government Canyon — Dinosaur Tracks & the Recharge Trails

A single hard-working day of hiking on the wild northwestern edge of San Antonio, where the city gives way abruptly to the Balcones Escarpment and the rugged limestone country of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. Government Canyon State Natural Area protects more than 12,000 acres of oak-juniper woodland, spring-fed canyons, and exposed Cretaceous bedrock barely thirty minutes from downtown. The day builds from an easy warm-up on the Recharge Trail to the natural area's showpiece: a long walk up the Joe Johnston Route to a slab of 110-million-year-old rock carrying a set of dinosaur tracks pressed into an ancient shoreline. Wildcat Canyon closes the loop with a quieter, shadier finish before the short drive back to the city. This is a boots-and-water day — the natural area is closed Monday through Thursday, so plan for a Friday, weekend, or holiday.

Boerne — Hill Country Main Street, Cibolo Creek & the Cave Without a Name

A single unhurried day in Boerne, the German-founded Hill Country town forty minutes northwest of San Antonio where the pace slows to a stroll along a historic main street. The morning walks the Hauptstrasse — a mile of limestone storefronts, antique shops, and shaded benches — before wandering the boardwalks and prairie of the Cibolo Center for Conservation on Cibolo Creek. Midday is a leisurely lunch on the Hauptstrasse, then the afternoon drops underground into the Cave Without a Name, one of Texas's most beautiful and least commercialized show caves, and finishes along the wooded edge of Guadalupe River State Park where the cypress-lined river slides over limestone shelves. An easy, scenic loop that trades highway miles for creek water, cave formations, and small-town quiet.

Castroville — The Little Alsace of Texas

Barely half an hour west of San Antonio sits one of the most unusual towns in Texas: Castroville, founded in 1844 by Alsatian empresario Henri Castro and settled by immigrants from the France–Germany borderlands who carried their steep-roofed cottages, their Catholic faith, and their Alsatian dialect across the Atlantic. This one-day journey walks the compact historic grid, where more than ninety original nineteenth-century houses survive — the highest concentration of intact Alsatian architecture anywhere in the United States. You'll tour the timber-framed Steinbach Haus, a 400-year-old house shipped from Alsace itself and reassembled here as a gift from Castroville's French sister city; wander the grounds of the Landmark Inn State Historic Site, a frontier stagecoach stop on the Medina River; and step inside St. Louis Catholic Church, the spiritual heart of the colony. Lunch means Alsatian sausage and the town's famous parisa. It is a short drive that feels like crossing an ocean and a century.