Comal County Texas map

The county lies on the I-35 corridor halfway between the two big cities: San Antonio is about 30 miles southwest of New Braunfels and Austin about 45 miles northeast, both by interstate. The Balcones Escarpment runs diagonally across it, roughly parallel to and just west of I-35. West of that line the county is rock, cedar and canyon; east of it, the ground flattens into the blackland and coastal prairie.

Five counties border it: Hays north, Guadalupe southeast, Bexar southwest, Kendall west and Blanco northwest. San Marcos is 20 miles up the interstate, Fredericksburg 49 miles northwest and Kerrville 55 miles northwest.

Comal County was created from Bexar County in 1846, the year after Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels bought land at the Comal Springs for the German emigration society known as the Adelsverein and named the settlement New Braunfels for his own town in Hesse. The county takes its name from the river rather than the town; comal is the Spanish word for a shallow cooking griddle, applied by early Spanish parties to the flat basin the springs fill.

Canyon Lake, the census-designated community around the reservoir, is unincorporated but is one of the largest settlements in the county by head count. Other places on the map — Sattler, Startzville, Fischer, Bergheim, Smithson Valley and Hunter — have post offices, schools or a store rather than a city government. Almost half the county's people now live outside the two towns, in subdivisions along RM 3159, RM 2673 and US-281.

Comal Springs, in Landa Park in the middle of New Braunfels, is the largest spring system in Texas and the biggest natural outlet of the Edwards Aquifer. The water leaves the ground at about 72 degrees year round and forms the Comal River, which loops through town and joins the Guadalupe roughly two and a half miles later. The springs stopped flowing for several months during the drought of the 1950s, the only recorded interruption, and aquifer pumping limits in the region are set partly to keep that from happening again — several species, including the fountain darter, live nowhere but here and in the San Marcos springs. The band of country west and northwest of the springs, along the escarpment, is mapped as the aquifer's recharge zone: the creeks crossing it run over fractured limestone and lose much of their flow straight into the ground, which is why development rules there are stricter than elsewhere in the county.

The Guadalupe River enters from Kendall County and is impounded behind Canyon Dam, a flood-control and water-supply project the Corps of Engineers completed in 1964. Below the dam, the river runs cold because the water is released from deep in the lake — cold enough that the state stocks rainbow trout in winter, and cool enough in summer that the tube-rental stretch between the dam and New Braunfels is busy from May to September. In the 2002 flood the lake topped its emergency spillway and the outflow scoured a gorge through the limestone, exposing dinosaur tracks and a fossil bed that is now toured by reservation.

New Braunfels was founded in March 1845 as the first way station of the Adelsverein's colonisation scheme, and for a time it was among the largest towns in Texas. German remained a common household language in the county into the twentieth century, and the pattern survives in place names, in the Wurstfest sausage festival held in New Braunfels every autumn, and in the dance halls.

Gruene, on the bluff above the Guadalupe at the north end of town, was a separate German farming settlement built around a cotton gin and a store. The boll weevil and the Depression emptied it; it survived because nobody bothered to knock it down, and it was annexed by New Braunfels and restored from the 1970s on. Gruene Hall, built in 1878, is billed as the oldest continuously operating dance hall in Texas and still books touring acts several nights a week. Between the halls, the rivers and the two water parks, tourism now rivals the county's manufacturing and distribution employers along I-35.