On July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River rose in the dark and killed at least 139 people in Central Texas, 117 of them in Kerr County. On July 16, 2026, it flooded again — one gauge climbing 32 feet in four hours, the river cresting at Center Point just under the 2025 mark, around 700 homes and businesses damaged or destroyed, and two people killed.
This is a travel guide, so let us be plain about what that means for a visitor. Kerr County is open. It also needs you. Summer tourism is normally about $102 million to the county economy, and a recovery group’s survey of more than two hundred local businesses concluded that 2026 would have to be an exceptional year to make up for what was lost. The mayor of Kerrville has put it in eight words: we’re open for business, and we’re still healing.
What it is like now
Downtown Kerrville is working. Louise Hays Park runs a mile along the river with paved trail and shade. The Museum of Western Art is open on Bandera Highway. Kerrville-Schreiner Park still has its cabins, its campsites, and its ten-plus miles of trail. The ecological restoration along the banks — roughly $14 million of it, funded through the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country — largely survived the second flood, which is the most hopeful sentence anyone has written about this river in two years.
You will also see the gaps: missing trees, raw banks, empty lots where buildings stood. Ask about it if someone brings it up. Let them not bring it up if they would rather not.
The most useful thing a visitor can do here is the ordinary thing — stay a night, eat two meals, buy something in a shop, and come back.
How to read a flash-flood watch
The Hill Country is one of the most flash-flood-prone regions in North America and always has been. Thin soil over limestone means rain does not soak in, it runs off, and a narrow river valley concentrates it. A storm you cannot see, thirty miles upstream, can put a wall of water past you an hour later under a blue sky.
- A watch means conditions are right for a flash flood. A warning means one is happening or imminent. Both are worth changing plans over.
- Check the forecast for the whole watershed upstream, not just the town you are standing in.
- If you are camping or staying on a riverbank, ask the operator for their flood plan and evacuation route before you unpack. A good one will have told you already.
- Turn on Wireless Emergency Alerts, and do not silence your phone overnight in a river valley.
- Never drive into moving water at a low-water crossing. Six inches will take your feet; a foot will float most cars.
- If the river is rising or turning muddy, get out and get uphill. Do not wait to see how bad it gets.
None of this is a reason to stay away. It is the same set of habits every local already has — and the same ones that made the difference in 2026, when better warning tools and a county that had rehearsed the drill got people out of the way of a flood nearly as big as the one before it.
