Austin is the capital of Texas.

[start]Lou Neff Point on Rock Island in Zilker Park has a prime skyline view of Austin. From due west of the skyscrapers, you can get golden “magic hour” light, and a rising moon over Lady Bird Lake.

The view from Hyatt Regency Austin includes the stepped One Congress Plaza building in the center and the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in the foreground.

The Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge (formerly known simply as the Congress Avenue Bridge) crosses over Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. Before construction of the Longhorn Dam was completed in 1960, the bridge crossed the Colorado River from which Lady Bird Lake is impounded. The bridge was known as the Congress Avenue Bridge from the construction of the first span across the Colorado River at that location in the late 19th century until November 16, 2006, when the Austin City Council renamed the current bridge in honor of Ann W. Richards, the 45th Governor of Texas and a long-term resident of Austin. The bridge is a concrete arch bridge with three southbound and three northbound vehicle lanes and sidewalks on both sides of the bridge.

The bridge is currently home to the world’s largest urban bat colony.

[start]The Boardwalk is a pedestrian bridge on Lady Bird Lake with viewing platforms looking north to Downtown Austin.

Stevie Ray Vaughan is a statue at Auditorium Shores of the local rock legend. In spite of a short-lived mainstream career spanning seven years, Vaughan was one of the most influential guitarists in the revival of blues in the 1980s.

Born and raised in Dallas, Vaughan dropped out of school and moved to Austin, Texas, which had more liberal and tolerant audiences. He gained fame after his performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, and in 1983 his debut studio album, Texas Flood, charted at number 38. The ten- song album was a commercially successful release that sold over half a million copies. After achieving sobriety in late 1986, he headlined concert tours with Jeff Beck in 1989 and Joe Cocker in 1990 before his death in a helicopter crash on August 27, 1990, at the age of 35.

The ConocoPhillips building is located west of the Capitol.

The central dome of the Texas State Capitol is centered by the Texas Star. The central rotunda is a whispering gallery and features portraits of every person who has served as president of the Republic of Texas or governor of the State of Texas.

The Goddess of Liberty stands on top of the Texas State Capitol, holding a Texas star in one hand. The original was removed during renovation in 1985. A new statue, cast of aluminum in molds made from the original zinc statue, was placed on the dome in June 1986. The original statue was restored and is now displayed at the Bullock Texas State History Museum.

[start]The Great Walk is the main approach from the south. It is flanked by four monuments and two spraying fountains, one of a boy with a fish and the other of.

a lily plant, plus two cannons dating from 1864 and 1865.

3 Confederate Soldiers Monument (Confederate Memorial) was erected in 1903 and designed by Pompeo Coppini.

Pompeo Coppini, 1907.

Heroes of the Alamo features a bronze statue of a Texan holding a muzzle-loader rifle. Erected in 1891, the monument honors those who fought and died at the thirteen-day siege during the Texas Revolution.

Texas African American History Memorial is a sculpture by Ed Dwight erected in 2016. The central portion depicts Juneteenth in Texas: June 19, 1865 when African Americans were freed from the bonds of slavery.

[start]Hood’s Texas Brigade Monument, erected in 1910, is a granite shaft topped with a bronze Confederate soldier. John B. Hood’s Texas Brigade fought in the Army of Northern Virginia between 1861-1865 and participated in many of the Civil War’s most famous battles including Sharpsburg (Antietam) and Gettysburg.

The Tejano Monument, unveiled in 2012, features nine life-size bronze statues by Armando Hinojosa. Tejanos were the Spanish and Mexican explorers and pioneers who began to settle Texas after the Spanish arrival in the 1500s.

[start]Texas Cowboy is a tribute to the “rough and romantic riders of the range” created in 1925 by American sculptor Constance Whitney.

1 Statue of Liberty is a bronze miniature of the New York landmark. It was erected 1951 by the Boy Scouts of America and is one of over 20 monuments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.

The statue (entitled Liberty Enlightening the World) is a figure of a robed woman representing Libertas, a Roman liberty goddess. She holds a torch above her head with her right hand, and in her left hand carries a tabula ansata inscribed in Roman numerals with “JULY IV MDCCLXXVI” (July 4, 1776), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States.

The New York statue was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States in 1886. It was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel.

[start]Ten Commandments is a 1961 monument made from Texas Sunset Red Granite. It is located between the Texas State Capitol and the Supreme Court of Texas.

The Ten Commandments monument was the topic of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case, Van Orden v. Perry, in which the display was challenged as unconstitutional. In late June 2005, the Court ruled that the display was not unconstitutional.

[start]Texas Pioneer Woman is a 1998 sculpture by Linda Sioux Henley of a young pioneer mother with baby on her arm. It commemorates the pioneering women of early Texas.

[start]Tribute to Texas Children depicts children on a field trip to the Texas Capitol. Students from over 600 Texas schools raised funds for the 1998 work.

The Texas Governor’s Mansion, also known simply as Governor’s Mansion is a historic home for the Governor of Texas in downtown Austin, Texas.

3 Capitol Extension Building (Central Court) is a building below ground level, with a four-story open-air inverted rotunda. Opened in 1993, the $75 million, the underground capitol extension doubled the square footage available to capitol occupants.

A large building there would have eliminated the historic north façade and covered what had traditionally been seen as an important public space. Instead, an expansion to the capitol was built beneath the north plaza, connecting to the existing capital underground.

The General Land Office Building, completed in 1857, in Austin, Texas is the oldest surviving state government office building in the city and the first building designed by a university-trained architect.

Texas Star is a sculpture outside the Bullock Texas State History Museum. A single, five-pointed star was first used in 1819 on a pre-revolutionary Texas flag and symbolized Texans’ solidarity in declaring independence from Mexico. The “Lone Star” is a prominent feature on the Flag of Texas and gave rise to the state’s official nickname “The Lone Star State.”

The Driskill, a Romanesque-style building completed in 1886, is the oldest operating hotel in Austin, Texas, USA, and one of the best-known hotels in Texas generally.

The lobby of the Driskill Hotel includes an open rotunda at the center that extended from the first to the fourth floors and culminated in a domed skylight.

Buford Tower is a tower standing along the north shore of Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin, Texas.

The Austin History Center is the local history collection of the Austin Public Library and the city’s historical archive, located at 810 Guadalupe Street in Austin, Texas, United States.

The Austonian is a residential skyscraper in Downtown Austin, Texas, USA.

[start]The John Bremond House was built in 1886 and is now the headquarters of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association.

The Frost Bank Tower is a skyscraper in Austin, Texas, United States.

One Congress Plaza is a skyscraper in Downtown Austin, the state capital of Texas in the United States.

Angelina Eberly is a bronze statue that commemorates the “Woman Who Saved Austin.”

In December 1842, Sam Houston ordered the secret removal of the archives of the Republic to safekeeping in Washington-on-the-Brazos. Angelina Belle Peyton Eberly (1798–1860), realizing that the symbols of national government were being removed from the city, fired a six- pound cannon into the General Land Office Building, arousing the town to what they considered theft. The ensuing conflict became known as the Archive War, which was won by the Austinites, preserving Austin as capital of Texas and keeper of the archives.

The Main Building is a structure at the center of the University of Texas at Austin campus in Downtown Austin, Texas, United States.

2 Littlefield Fountain is a World War I memorial monument designed by Italian-born sculptor Pompeo Coppini, located at the entrance to the university’s South Mall. Completed in 1933, the monument is named after university regent and benefactor George W. Littlefield, whose donation paid for its design and construction.

George Washington is an outdoor 1955 bronze sculpture by Italian American artist Pompeo Coppini.

The Union Building is a building on the University of Texas at Austin campus, serving as a “college independent community center” or “living room” for students.

The Littlefield House is a historic home in Austin, Texas on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, also known as the LBJ Presidential Library, is one of 13 Presidential Libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

On the 10th floor of the LBJ Library is a replica Oval Office which duplicates President Johnson’s office in the White House.

The Texas Memorial Museum, which is located on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, USA, is named in honor of the 1936 Texas Centennial.

The Seven Mustangs is a bronze sculpture by Alexander Phimister Proctor, modeled from 1939 to 1941, and dedicated in 1948.

The Statesman Bat Observation Center affords the best place to see Austin’s bats, the world’s largest urban bat colony.

The Center is located southeast of Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge which, during the summer, is home to around one million Mexican free-tailed bats. The bats reside beneath the road deck in gaps between the concrete component structures. They are migratory, spending their summers in Austin and the winters in Mexico. According to Bat Conservation International, between 750,000 and 1.5 million bats reside underneath the bridge each summer. Since Austin’s human population is about 900,000, there are sometimes more bats than people in Austin during summer.

The nightly emergence of the bats from underneath the bridge at dusk, and their flight across Lady Bird Lake primarily to the east, to feed themselves, attract as many as 100,000 tourists annually. Tourists can see the bats from the bridge, from the sides of the river and from boats.

[start]Nightwing (The Bat) is an abstract depiction of a bat which turns with the wind. The 1998 sculpture is opposite the Statesman Bat Observation Center.

[start]The Kiss is a bronze statue by local artist Charles Umlauf in the The Umlauf Sculpture Garden. In 1985, Charles and Angeline Umlauf donated their home, studio, and 168 Umlauf sculptures to the City of Austin.

In 1992 amateur paleontologists discovered more than 100 preserved tracks made by six or seven prehistoric reptiles, along with the bones of an ancient turtle within Zilker Park.

The Isamu Taniguchi Japanese Garden features a koi pond.

Allens Boots is a retail store in Austin, Texas, that specializes in western wear.

[start]Roadhouse Relics is a studio and gallery where neon artist Todd Sanders crafts his vintage-style designs using durable modern materials and specialized weathering techniques.

[start]Greetings From Austin is a giant postcard mural by Rory Skagen and Bill Brakhage, 2013, at Roadhouse Relics.

Longhorn Dam is a dam crossing the Colorado River in Austin, Texas, United States, where it creates Lady Bird Lake.

[start]The Arm at Hyde Park Gym is a gargantuan dumbbell-curling bicep that protrudes from a weightlifting gym.

[start]Bull Creek is a watershed with several waterfalls and swimming holes.

Texas Military Forces Museum is a museum about the history of Texas’ militia, volunteer forces and Texas Military Forces from 1823 to the present.

The Contemporary Austin — Laguna Gloria, formerly known as the AMOA-Arthouse at Laguna Gloria, is the former home of Clara Driscoll and site of a 1916 Italianate-style villa on the shores of Lake Austin in Austin, Texas.

Hamilton Pool Preserve is a natural pool that was created when the dome of an underground river collapsed due to massive erosion thousands of years ago.

[start]McKinney Falls State Park features two waterfalls.

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is a public botanical garden dedicated to creating a more sustainable earth through research and education.

[start]Dinosaur Park in Cedar Creek has a 16-foot tall T. Rex and over 20 other life-size models along a tree-lined nature trail.