When my husband and I were in Texas for vacation, we found a very interesting place just off the highway between San Antonio and Austin. A few miles down the road we came across an interesting bit of history (and nature) called the Aquarena.
One of the abandoned structures
The Aquarena was a huge tourist attraction from the 1940’s through the mid 1990’s. It was built on the San Marcos springs and Spring Lake. These springs bubble up from under the ground to form the head of the San Marcos River. The area started out with a beautiful hotel at the edge of Spring Lake in 1928, built by Arthur Rogers, a San Marcos resident. A year later, in 1946, his son added onto the popular hotel by offering tours of the lake in a glass-bottom boat. This brought in many more tourists and in 1951 an underwater submarine theater was added. Visitors could go into this theater (it looked just like a submarine) and watch the mermaid girls and underwater clowns as they fed fish, swam through the water and even ate food and drank from soda bottles while underwater (a very difficult trick to learn, according to one of the girls who used to work there).
The water shows became so popular that a new star joined the group in 1969 – “Ralph” the swimming pig. Yes, a pig. The park would train baby pigs to follow a milk bottle through the water as soon as they were old enough to learn and eventually they learned to love the water – diving enthusiastically into the lake when it was their turn!
The park was very popular and, from looking at the postcards and posters, a very fun place to visit. They had a restaurant, a sky tower and even a sky ride across the lake.
One of the glass bottomed boats still in operation
But by the mid-1990’s the Aquarena just wasn’t as big an attraction anymore. The underwater shows, sky rides and poor “Ralph” weren’t bringing in the crowds and the Aquarena was sold to the University of Texas. UT stopped all the old shows and rides and started to put the area back to its natural state. The underwater theater and rides were abandoned and ignored, but the glass-bottom boats are still in operation to allow visitors to see the springs bubbling up at the bottom of the clear lake. Students now study the habitat, wildlife and history of the area as part of their curriculum and the Aquarena is still open to the public, but now it is for learning and wildlife appreciation, not profit and swimming pigs.While we were there, we visited the small aquarium that UT has put together with native fish, reptiles and amphibians that you can find around the springs. We wandered the grounds and admired the old rides and theater that are still there. It felt a lot like a ghost town with the overgrown equipment and abandoned restaurant, but it was a lot of fun to try and imagine the ghost families walking around, riding the rides, seeing the shows and having a fun family vacation.
A Great Blue Heron patiently waiting for "lunch" to swim past
One of the really nice areas is a boardwalk through the edge of the lakeshore. It is a great way to see some of the wildlife there. We saw turtles sunning themselves, fish moving through the crystal clear water, a Great Blue Heron fishing and, best of all, a Green Heron walking through grasses and catching a dragonfly for lunch!
This Green Heron has just caught "lunch"
All in all, it’s a neat little piece of history that hasn’t been lost. The Aquarena did its time as a family-oriented tourist attraction, and now it is back to nature, the students learning about it and those of us who appreciate it. 
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