Reptilandia

Reptilandia Reptile Lagoon is an indoor reptile zoo on US 281 just north of Johnson City, opened in December 2022 by a herpetologist who had already run a zoo of the same name in Costa Rica for more than two decades. Quetzal Dwyer grew up in New York, worked at a reptile zoo in the Canary Islands, and founded the original Reptilandia in Costa Rica before bringing the name to the Hill Country. The Johnson City building is a two storey herpetarium with its enclosures arranged by the part of the world the animals come from, holding more than sixty species and several hundred animals.

Its best known resident has been a male Komodo dragon named Bumi, of the largest living species of lizard. Among the less familiar ones are the Gumprecht's green pit viper of Southeast Asia, the Milos viper, which lives on a handful of Greek islands in the Aegean, the snake necked turtle of New Guinea, whose neck can be nearly as long as its shell, and the Fly River turtle, a freshwater species with flippers like a sea turtle's and a snout like a pig's.

Dwyer's own fieldwork has included cataloguing the reptiles of the Swan Islands off Honduras, where the government has planned a maximum security prison. Texas Monthly greeted the Johnson City zoo with the headline Move Over, Snake Farm, a nod to the older roadside reptile attraction on Interstate 35 at New Braunfels.