The Springs Beneath the Streets

Eureka Springs takes its name from a single spring, but it sits above many. The Ozark limestone of this region is riddled with solution caves, fractures, and underground streams, and water finds its way to the surface at dozens of points across the surrounding hills. The founders of the town did not merely settle near one spring.

They followed the water as it emerged from the hillsides, piped and channeled it to where they needed it, and built the town along the creeks and ravines that the springs created. This is one reason the streets of Eureka Springs follow such irregular paths. They followed the hills and hollows of the terrain.

In the early boom years, visitors could walk from one spring to another on a circuit of the hillsides, sampling the different mineral waters and debating which had the more therapeutic quality. The springs were named and mapped and assigned healing specialties the way a spa menu assigns treatments. Basin Spring, tied to the town's earliest days, still flows in a small park at the center of town, maintained by the city as a public amenity and a living connection to the story of why the town is here.

Many of the other springs were capped or redirected as development covered the hillsides, and the underground water now flows largely out of sight. But the land still shows the work the water has done. Every hollow, every ravine, every crooked street in Eureka Springs is a record of the springs that ran here long before anyone thought to call the water healing.