The walk up to La Sal Del Rey gives hints of what lays ahead in glimpses of white between the thick and thorny green stands of South Texas brush.

Then it opens in full view, a stunning expanse of an ancient lakebed with four million-plus tons of salt under shallow waters that reflect like mirrors to the clouds above. In dry months, the water recedes and then is completely gone. What’s left behind is a hard floor of granular white that crunches under the steps of the latest visitors to a lake whose history goes back to native peoples and Spanish explorers of the 18th century.

La Sal Del Rey is a 530-acre hypersaline lake that is thought to have formed over 11,000 years ago in a wind-carved depression. A shallow basin forms with rain. The lake has no outlet, so without moisture from above, the water evaporates, and it leaves a concentration of salt on a crusty floor that is 10 times the salinity level of oceans.

“The salt is always there,” said David Vela, a park ranger for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “What you see is just the surface. It (lake) is on a salt dome of about four million tons of salt.”

The lake’s geographic marker today is that it is found 20 miles north of Edinburg, just east of U.S. Highway 281 on state Highway 186. In the early 1700s, it was discovered by Spaniards who were establishing the first towns along the Rio Grande in what is now the eastern edge of Tamaulipas. Spanish law in the New World dictated that mineral rights belonged to the crown. The richness found at the hypersaline lake became the King’s salt – La Sal Del Rey.

“Salt was the first export of the Rio Grande Valley,” said Vela of the salineros who would the mine salt deposits and take the product into Mexico using mules and oxcarts. 

Lake Of Two Skies

The sky is different at Hidalgo County’s historic salt lake.

When the lake is dry – as it usually is early in the year – and the clouds are puffy, they settle over what Vela describes as a “sheet of sand and salt.” One of the sky shades seen is azure, a light royal blue hovering over the seashell white of the hard salt floor below. With water, it becomes a wading lake and its shallow salty waters become mirrors of the clouds hovering over La Sal.

“The water reflects off the salt and it’s almost like you have two skies,” Vela said during an interview with a city of Edinburg media crew.

The feeling of getting lost in time and space is real and is perhaps one reason that Texas Highways named La Sal Del Rey as one of 12 spots in the magazine’s “Your Texas Travel Bucket List” for 2026. It is off the beaten path and for most of the 1900s was largely inaccessible to the public. In the early 2000s, the lake came under the auspices of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

There are two walking trails leading to La Sal and limited parking is offered. Don’t expect the usual amenities nor the park ranger staffing found at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge or similar nature parks. You’re on your own at La Sal, a true solitude experience which is perhaps the allure of its mystique. 

“It was one of those places that makes you slow down and just breathe for a minute,” said one visitor after experiencing La Sal and posting about it on social media. “If you close your eyes, it honestly sounds like the ocean.”

Spans The Ages

Weather permitting, La Sal does draw a steady stream of visitors on highway 186 between Raymondville and San Manuel. 

There are no official numbers on how many people visit the historic lake, but there are likely more of them than previous years with the emergence of social media. Millennials in particular have seemed to take a liking to the salty flats, even using La Sal as a mystical place to propose marriage if photos on social media are any judge of budding romances. 

It’s quite a turn of events for a centuries-old lake that despite its remoteness was a destination for native American people, Spanish settlers and later for those allied with the Confederate South who took salt deposits by camel to Brownsville and Matamoros for shipment globally to raise revenues for the Civil War effort. And its source is never-ending as groundwater dissolves small bits of an underground salt dome that spans the ages.

“It’s just a phenomenal place,” Vela said. “It’s a treasure in our backyard.”