New Braunfels Family Fun: Rivers, Caverns & Water Parks

Schlitterbahn put New Braunfels on the map as Texas's water-park capital, but the town's whole relationship with fun and water goes back more than a century further, to the spring-fed park a nineteenth-century mill owner's son opened for weekend excursion trains. This driving loop connects that origin story — Landa Park's springs, the city's own free tube chute, and the modern water-park flagship — with a very different kind of natural wonder: a cave system four college students stumbled into by accident in 1960. It's the honest version of 'family fun in New Braunfels': part built attraction, part natural discovery, both worth the trip.