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Rockport is a city in Hot Spring County, Arkansas, on the Ouachita River just north of Malvern.

Rockport is one of the oldest named places in Arkansas; it was founded on August 31, 1837, and incorporated on January 2, 1851.

The community takes its name from the large novaculite boulders in the bed of the Ouachita River at this crossing.

A plaque in Rockport claims that Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto visited the site in 1541, though historians today are less certain about the exact route of his expedition west of the Mississippi River.

The Hunter-Dunbar Expedition struggled through the rapids at Rockport on December 3, 1804, and the Military Road, also called the Southwest Trail, later used the boulders as a river ford.

Around 1847, a bridge completed across the Ouachita River at Rockport is said to have been the first toll bridge built in Arkansas.

Rockport served as the county seat of Hot Spring County from 1846 to 1879.

When the Cairo and Fulton Railroad routed its tracks farther south instead of through Rockport, the rival city of Malvern was founded, and in 1873 a major fire destroyed Rockport's courthouse.

County government moved to Malvern in 1879, and Rockport has lived in its neighbor's shadow ever since.

An iron bridge built across the Ouachita at Rockport in 1900 was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992; after storm and flood damage, its remains were salvaged from the river in 2004.