Austin, Texas

Where Austin is

Austin is the seat of Travis County, at 30.27°N, 97.74°W, on the Colorado River of Texas, which is dammed through the city to form Lady Bird Lake and, upstream, the Highland Lakes. The city sits on the Balcones Escarpment, the line where the flat blackland prairie to the east meets the limestone Hill Country to the west, which is why the western neighborhoods are hilly and the eastern ones are not. Elevation downtown is about 490 ft. Interstate 35 runs north-south through the city. Austin is on Central Time, as is all of Texas except El Paso and Hudspeth counties in the far west.

How it became the capital

The Republic of Texas moved its capital several times after 1836, including Columbia and Houston. In 1839 President Mirabeau Lamar had the village of Waterloo on the Colorado chosen as a new capital on the frontier and renamed for Stephen F. Austin. Sam Houston tried to move the government back to Houston in 1842 and sent men to seize the archives; Austin residents fired a cannon at them and kept the records, an episode called the Archive War. Statewide votes in 1850 and 1872 settled the capital in Austin for good.

Population

Austin had 961,855 residents in 2020, the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 11th-largest in the United States. Houston, the largest Texas city, had 2,304,580. The five-county Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area has about 2.3 million people, and grew by a third between 2010 and 2020, the fastest of any large US metro area.

The capitol

The Texas State Capitol was designed by Elijah E. Myers and completed in 1888. It was paid for with three million acres of Panhandle land, which became the XIT Ranch. The building is made of sunset red granite from Marble Falls and stands 308 ft to the top of the Goddess of Liberty statue, about 15 ft taller than the US Capitol. An underground extension nearly doubled its size in 1993. It sits at the head of Congress Avenue, which was laid out to give a view of the building from the river.

Distances to other cities

Related maps

• Texas map — the whole state with borders, cities and counties.
• Austin city map — the city page with nearby cities and distances.
• Texas county map · blank Texas map · printable Texas map.
• All 50 state capitals on one map, and the state capitals quiz.
• South region · West South Central division · Central Time Zone.