The Old Hidalgo Pumphouse.
The salt lakes I wrote about are north. The pumphouse is south. I put them on the map link above.
If you zoom in on the pumphouse and click the “satellite” button, you can see how it is situated. The pumphouse used to provide water from the Rio Grande to irrigate the valley. Agriculture has been a big deal here since the early 1900s.
You might wonder why, if the purpose of the pumphouse was to pump water from the Rio Grande, they didn’t build it right on the river. Well, the answer is that they did build it right on the river, but in 1933 a hurricane flooded the valley and when the water went down, the river was relocated a half a mile away. The channel you can see on the map had to be dug so that water from the river could once again reach the steam driven pumps of the pumphouse.
Now it’s a museum and world birding location. Here is a walk around the grounds.
