Uvalde County Texas map

The county sits west of San Antonio on the southern edge of the Edwards Plateau, with eight neighbours: Real north, Bandera northeast, Medina east, Frio southeast, Zavala south, Maverick southwest, Kinney west and Edwards northwest. San Antonio is 77 miles east on US-90, Del Rio 68 miles west on the same road, Eagle Pass 63 miles southwest and Kerrville 61 miles northeast.

The county was created from the Bexar District in 1850 and organized in 1856. The name comes from the Cañón de Ugalde, a canyon north of the townsite where the Spanish commander Juan de Ugalde fought Apache raiders in 1790; the spelling drifted over the following century. Reading Wood Black laid out the town of Uvalde in 1853, and the whole county forms the Uvalde micropolitan statistical area.

The northern third of the county is plateau cut by canyons; the southern two-thirds is level brush country. The line between them is the Balcones fault zone, and it is the reason for the county's hydrology: as the Nueces, Dry Frio, Frio and Sabinal cross the faulted limestone belt, much of their flow disappears underground into the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. In dry years the beds south of the escarpment run dry while the same rivers are still flowing hard a few miles upstream. The county keeps a set of recharge and flood-retarding structures on those streams.

Above the escarpment the rivers are cold, clear and lined with cypress. Below it, irrigated fields draw on the aquifer for winter vegetables, corn, wheat and pecans, and the brush supports cattle and goats.

Garner State Park lies on the Frio River at Concan, in the northeast of the county on US-83 and FM 1050. The Civilian Conservation Corps built its stone-and-cedar buildings in the late 1930s, including the pavilion above the river where a jukebox dance has been held on summer evenings since the park opened in 1941 — a tradition many Texas families measure their summers by. The park is one of the most heavily used camping parks in the state system: the river bottom is packed in July, day-use entry is by reservation, and cabins book out months ahead. Old Baldy, the bare limestone knob above the campgrounds, is the standard climb. The park is named for John Nance Garner, the Uvalde lawyer who became Speaker of the U.S. House and then vice president under Franklin Roosevelt.

Uvalde is the county's only sizeable town, with 15,223 residents in 2020, laid out around a large central plaza that is unusually generous for a Texas county seat. The 1891 Grand Opera House still stands on Main Street; the Briscoe–Garner Museum occupies Garner's house and covers both him and Dolph Briscoe, the Uvalde rancher who served as governor of Texas in the 1970s. Southwest Texas Junior College has its main campus here, and a Texas A&M AgriLife research centre works on crops and rangeland for the region. Uvalde is also known nationally for the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in May 2022.

The county's other business is what grows on the brush. Uvalde honey, produced from guajillo and huajilla blooms on the surrounding ranges, has a distinct pale colour and mild flavour and has been shipped from here for over a century. Hunting leases for white-tailed deer, quail, dove and turkey are the other reliable rural income, and the county fills with hunters from November on.