Houston's Most Iconic Landmarks

When NASA chose Houston in the early 1960s for its new Manned Spacecraft Center, the city became the home of America's human spaceflight program. The center, renamed the Lyndon B.

Johnson Space Center in 1973, trained the astronauts and ran Mission Control for the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle missions, and it still plays a central role in the International Space Station program.

Space Center Houston opened in 1992 as its official visitor center and became a Smithsonian Affiliate in 2014.

Inside, visitors can see real spacecraft, spacesuits, moon rocks and exhibits on the future of exploration. Outside, Independence Plaza places a full-scale shuttle replica atop NASA 905, one of the original Boeing 747 shuttle carrier aircraft, and visitors can walk through both.

The center also tells the stories of the astronauts and engineers who made the missions possible.

Tram tours leave the visitor center to visit parts of the Johnson Space Center, such as Rocket Park, where a complete Saturn V rocket lies in its own building, and, depending on the tour, the historic Apollo Mission Control room or astronaut training facilities.

John and Dominique de Menil, collectors who arrived in Houston in the 1940s, gathered one of the most important private art collections of the 20th century, from antiquities and Byzantine icons to African and Oceanic art, surrealism and postwar American painting.

In 1987, the Menil Collection opened to the public in a building designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, his first museum in the United States.

The building is long and low, clad in gray cypress siding to match the surrounding bungalows, which the Menils also bought and painted the same color. Inside, a roof of curved white leaves filters natural light into the galleries, creating a calm, intimate atmosphere.

The campus has grown to include the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Drawing Institute and outdoor art among its lawns.

The de Menils believed art should be accessible to everyone, and admission has always been free. The museum shows only a part of its collection at a time, so exhibitions change regularly.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science traces its roots to 1909 and moved to Hermann Park in the 1960s.

It has grown into one of the most visited museums in the country, with permanent halls covering paleontology, gems and minerals, ancient Egypt, energy, African wildlife and more.

The Morian Hall of Paleontology displays dinosaur and other prehistoric skeletons in dramatic poses, while the Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals presents dazzling crystals and gemstones in dark galleries.

The Cockrell Butterfly Center is a three-story glass rainforest where hundreds of live butterflies fly freely around visitors.

A planetarium and a giant-screen theater complete the visit, and the museum runs a satellite location in Sugar Land and the George Observatory in Brazos Bend State Park.

Buffalo Bayou is the slow, winding waterway that gave birth to Houston in 1836.

For much of the 20th century, it was neglected, but a major transformation led by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership turned the stretch west of downtown into Buffalo Bayou Park, which reopened in 2015 with about 160 acres of trails, gardens, lawns and lighting.

The park follows the bayou for more than two miles between downtown and Shepherd Drive, with paved paths, bridges, a dog park, the Lost Lake area, kayak and bike rentals and public art.

Under the Waugh Drive Bridge, a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats lives in the expansion joints, emerging at dusk in warm months.

The park was designed to flood and recover, absorbing high water during storms, which makes it a model of how Houston lives with its bayous.

On April 21, 1836, Texan forces led by Sam Houston surprised and defeated the Mexican army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna on the plains of San Jacinto, east of present-day Houston, in a battle that lasted only minutes.

The victory secured the independence of Texas, which became a republic before joining the United States in 1845.

For the battle's centennial, Texas built the San Jacinto Monument, completed in 1939.

Faced with Texas limestone and topped by a large star, the column rises more than 567 feet, slightly taller than the Washington Monument, and is often described as the tallest monument column in the world.

A museum at its base tells the history of Texas from early times to statehood.

The surrounding San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site preserves the battlefield, with markers explaining the events of the day.

The Waterwall was designed by the architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee as part of the development of Williams Tower, the tall Uptown skyscraper originally known as the Transco Tower.

The semicircular fountain rises 64 feet, a height chosen to echo the tower's 64 floors, and was completed in the mid-1980s.

Water cascades down both the inner and outer faces of the wall, recirculating at about 11,000 gallons per minute. Standing inside the horseshoe, visitors are surrounded by the roar and the cool mist, a welcome relief in the Houston heat.

A lawn lined with live oaks leads up to the fountain.

The site was bought for public use in 2008 and renamed for the developer Gerald D. Hines, whose company built the tower and The Galleria nearby.