Bandera County Texas map

The county sits on the southern edge of the Edwards Plateau, where the plateau breaks into steep canyons before dropping to the plain. It is part of the San Antonio metropolitan statistical area, though almost none of it looks metropolitan: San Antonio is 51 miles southeast in a straight line, and the drive in on SH-16 crosses more deer than traffic for the first 30 miles.

Six counties border it: Kerr to the north, Kendall northeast, Bexar southeast, Medina south, Uvalde southwest and Real west. Kerrville is the nearest town of size at 21 miles north, Fredericksburg 42 miles northeast and New Braunfels 68 miles east.

Bandera County was created from Bexar County in 1856 and takes its name from Bandera Pass, the gap in the hills on the Kerr County line where the old road from San Antonio to the upper Guadalupe crosses the divide; bandera is Spanish for flag. The first settlers were English-speaking mill hands cutting cypress on the Medina, followed in the mid-1850s by Polish families from Silesia and by German colonists, and the Polish settlement at Bandera is among the oldest in the United States.

That is the entire incorporated list. Bandera is one of the smallest county seats in the state, and roughly 96 per cent of the county's 20,851 residents live outside any city limit. The places that matter on the ground are unincorporated: Lakehills and Pipe Creek on the southeastern side toward Medina Lake, Medina on SH-16 north of Bandera, Tarpley on RM 470, Vanderpool in the far west near Lost Maples, and Bandera Falls and Lake Medina Shores among the river subdivisions.

The county's growth has come almost entirely as scattered rural subdivisions on the ridges and along the Medina — the 2024 census estimate is about 22,830 — which is why the population is large relative to the size of its only town.

Three ranch-to-market roads — RM 337, RM 335 and RM 336 — form a loop of roughly a hundred miles across the canyon country and are ridden by motorcyclists from all over the state. Only RM 337 lies in Bandera County: it leaves Medina westbound, climbs and drops through the Sabinal canyon at Vanderpool, and ends at Leakey in Real County, where the other two carry the loop north into Edwards and Kimble counties.

The appeal is grade and camber rather than distance. The roads follow the canyon rims and drop into the creek crossings without cuttings or guard rails, and several crossings are low-water slabs that flood. There is no fuel between Medina and Leakey.

Lost Maples State Natural Area sits at the county's western edge on RM 187, four miles north of Vanderpool, along the Sabinal River. It protects an isolated stand of bigtooth maple growing in a sheltered, spring-fed canyon — a relict of a cooler climate, marooned far from the species' main range. It is one of the few places in Texas with dependable autumn colour, usually late October into November, and the park limits entry on peak weekends.

Hill Country State Natural Area, southwest of Bandera off RM 1077, is a different proposition: more than 5,000 acres of ranch land given to the state on the condition it stay largely undeveloped, with dozens of miles of trail open to horses and no water or hook-ups over most of it. Between the two, and the Medina River running through the middle of the county, Bandera has more public land per resident than most of the Hill Country.