Exploring The Historic Downtown San Marcos

By Jemia Spence
Web Content Contributor

Downtown San Marcos, also known as The Square, must be one of the things that I love most about going to school here. It’s filled with locally-owned restaurants, bistros, nightspots, and unique clothing stores, it has a bit of everything. If you love vintage things, like me, the square has cute stores, and you can shop for tons of handmade pieces and cute gifts.

Scenery

There is nothing like spending a beautiful weekend out and about here in San Marcos. You’ll see lots of people hanging out by the river at Sewell Park tubing, sunbathing, or playing sand volleyball.

The campus is so beautiful on a hot summer day and, it’s so great to see a lot of the community and students hanging outside. Right around the corner, you can walk a visit the historic Downtown San Marcos.

Shopping  

My favorite thing is to do is to go shopping, especially in little boutiques and specialty stores for cool vintage items.

Stop by Vagabond Vintage clothing store to stock up on western wear, or for some great thrifting pieces. Pitaya is another store. They have fashionable jewelry, dresses, skirts, and crop tops that are perfect for the spring and summertime. Also, Monkies Vintage and thrift store has nice graphic tees and items from the ’80s and ’90s. Lastly KnD’s resale is another place I like to stop by to find up-cycled goods and nice Texas State University tops that are perfect to wear to sports games.

I can’t forget to mention Sundance Record Lagoon store, it was my first time going there and it was amazing. For anyone looking at vinyls for your record player, they have a wide variety of music genres and artists, as well as posters, tote bags, sunglasses and so much more. I found this old Kanye West album that I used to listen to and, now I can play it at home on my record player.

Dining

So of course, you get hungry when you are walking outside going from store-to-store shopping all day. On the Square, you’ll find some restaurants, bars, and bistros like Craft house, Blue Salamander Cantina, Stellar Coffee, Doughnut Babes and Coffee, Root Cellar Café, and so many more places that are worth a try.

However, nothing compares to the nightlife in downtown San Marcos. Bars like Mayloos, Axis, the Vault, Stonewall, the Marc, Harpers, etc. are usually packed with college students on the weekend and it is so much fun when you drink responsibly.

There are so many fun things to do living in San Marcos and if you live on campus or near, you’re walking distance away from all the fun. So hopefully next time you’re bored on a beautiful weekend or visiting San Marcos and want to experience the historic Downtown area, you can visit and enjoy some of these places.

Featured Image by Jemia Spence