Bexar County Texas map
29.45° N · 98.52° W · County seat: San Antonio · 1,256 sq mi
Bexar County is the second-most-populous county in Texas, with 2,009,324 people counted in 2020, and one city holds nearly three quarters of them. The Balcones Escarpment crosses the county from west to northeast: north of that line are limestone hills, springs and the recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer, and south of it the ground flattens into prairie and the South Texas plains.
San Antonio fills the centre. The two ring roads are the clearest features: Loop 410 close in, Loop 1604 well outside it, with I-10, I-35 and I-37 running out through both.
Where Bexar County is
Bexar sits at the point where the Hill Country stops and South Texas begins, roughly 190 miles west of Houston and about 150 miles from both the Rio Grande and the Gulf. Seven counties touch it: Kendall to the north, Comal northeast, Guadalupe east, Wilson southeast, Atascosa south, Medina west and Bandera northwest.
New Braunfels is 30 miles northeast of the county's centre in a straight line, San Marcos 46 miles, Kerrville 56 miles northwest and Austin 73 miles northeast. The Census Bureau estimated the county's population at about 2,128,000 in 2024, so it is still adding roughly the population of a mid-sized town every year, almost all of it on the north and far west sides beyond Loop 1604.
Bexar is one of the original counties of the Republic of Texas, created in 1836 out of the Mexican municipality of the same name — a district that at first covered an enormous stretch of West Texas. Dozens of later counties, including Atascosa, Medina and Dimmit, were cut from that original territory. The name comes from the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar, the Spanish garrison founded beside the river in 1718 and named for the Duke of Béjar's family.
The San Antonio River and the River Walk
The San Antonio River rises from springs just north of downtown, at the foot of the Balcones fault where water forced up out of the Edwards Aquifer reaches the surface. Those springs are the reason the Spanish put a presidio and a mission here rather than anywhere else on the road between the Rio Grande and East Texas.
Downtown, the river runs a full storey below street level through a horseshoe bend, and the walkways built along it in the 1930s and 1940s became the River Walk. It has since been extended twice: the Museum Reach runs north past the Pearl brewery complex, and the Mission Reach runs south out of downtown as a restored river channel with a hike-and-bike path connecting the missions. The river leaves the county at the southeast corner and eventually reaches the Gulf below Goliad.
Five missions and a World Heritage site
Five Spanish colonial missions stand along a short stretch of the river in Bexar County, closer together than anywhere else in the borderlands. Mission San Antonio de Valero, founded in 1718, was secularised, used as a barracks and became known as the Alamo; the 1836 siege there made it the most visited historic site in Texas. Four more — Concepción, San José, San Juan Capistrano and Espada — lie downstream and are protected as San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Espada still has its acequia and an 18th-century aqueduct carrying irrigation water over a creek.
In 2015 UNESCO inscribed all five missions together on the World Heritage List, the only such site in Texas. The Mission Reach trail links four of them, and Mission Road runs past the same four by car.
- The Alamo map
Site plan of the mission and its grounds in downtown San Antonio, with parking and nearby streets.
- Six Flags Fiesta Texas map
The theme park in an old limestone quarry off I-10 on the northwest side of the county.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| San Antonio (part) | City (county seat) | 1,434,312 |
| Converse | City | 27,712 |
| Universal City (part) | City | 19,714 |
| Live Oak | City | 15,776 |
| Leon Valley | City | 11,549 |
| Helotes | City | 9,042 |
| Kirby | City | 8,146 |
| Alamo Heights | City | 7,364 |
| Selma (part) | City | 7,146 |
| Fair Oaks Ranch (part) | City | 6,392 |
| Windcrest | City | 5,859 |
| Schertz (part) | City | 5,763 |
| Sandy Oaks | City | 5,075 |
| Terrell Hills | City | 5,043 |
Alamo Heights, Terrell Hills, Olmos Park, Windcrest and Castle Hills are enclaves — incorporated towns completely surrounded by San Antonio, each with its own police force and school arrangements. Along the northeast corridor, Universal City, Selma, Schertz and Fair Oaks Ranch straddle the county line into Comal and Guadalupe. The smaller towns of China Grove, St. Hedwig and Hollywood Park round out the incorporated list.
Roads
- Loop 410 – the inner ring, a full circle of freeway around the older city, passing the airport on the north and Lackland on the southwest. Interchanges with I-10, I-35, I-37, US-90 and US-281.
- Loop 1604 – the outer ring, several miles further out and roughly twice the diameter. Freeway on the north and west sides where growth has been heaviest, and a divided highway on the south side.
- Interstate 10 – enters from the northwest past Fiesta Texas and Boerne, runs through downtown and leaves east toward Seguin and Houston.
- Interstate 35 – northeast to New Braunfels, San Marcos and Austin; southwest through the county's western side toward Devine, Pearsall and Laredo.
- Interstate 37 – begins at the downtown interchange and runs southeast past Brooks, out through Atascosa and Live Oak to Corpus Christi.
- US-281 – north through the hills toward Bulverde and Johnson City; south past the airport and Loop 410 toward Pleasanton.
- US-90 – west past Lackland toward Castroville, Hondo and Del Rio; east it merges with I-10.
- US-87 and US-181 – southeast toward Stockdale, Kenedy and the Gulf coast.
- State Highway 16 – northwest into Bandera County; south through Poteet toward Jourdanton.
Bases, hospitals and the aquifer
Joint Base San Antonio, formed in 2010, combined three long-established installations under one command and is one of the largest joint bases in the Defense Department. Fort Sam Houston, on the near northeast side, holds Brooke Army Medical Center and the military's combined medical training campus. Lackland, southwest of downtown off US-90, runs Air Force basic military training, so nearly every enlisted airman passes through Bexar County. Randolph, northeast near Universal City and Schertz, is a flying training and personnel command base and is known for its 1931 administration building.
The South Texas Medical Center, northwest of downtown inside Loop 410, is a separate cluster of hospitals, the UT Health San Antonio schools of medicine, nursing and dentistry, and research institutes. Between the two, medicine and the military are the county's largest employers.
The band of fractured limestone across the northern third of the county is the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, where creeks running off the hills sink into the rock and refill the aquifer that supplies San Antonio's water. Because the same band is where the newest subdivisions are being built, development over it is regulated more tightly than anywhere else in the county, and the city and county have spent bond money buying land over the recharge zone to keep it undeveloped.