Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Lakehills, TX

Lakehills is an unincorporated census-designated place in Bandera County, Texas, on the north shore of Medina Lake, and with 5,295 residents at the 2020 census it is the most populous place in Bandera County — far larger than the county seat of Bandera itself.

Lakehills exists only because of Medina Lake: the Medina Dam was built between 1911 and 1913 by some 1,500 men working around the clock to dam the Medina River in a box canyon, creating the reservoir the community sits on.

The Medina Dam was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 in recognition of its engineering and economic importance to the region.

The community was originally known as Upper Medina Lake and took the name Lakehills when a post office substation was established there in the early 1960s.

Unlike the Medina River towns nearby that were founded in the 1840s, Lakehills developed almost exclusively as a recreational, lake-oriented community.

Lakehills grew from about 300 residents in the mid-1970s to 2,239 by the early 1990s, 4,668 in 2000, and 5,295 in 2020.

Lakehills has roughly 2,386 households, averaging about 2.57 people per household.

During the 2010–2013 drought, Medina Lake fell below 5 percent of capacity and Lakehills was described in news reports as a ghost town; heavy rains in 2015 and 2016 then refilled the lake to 100 percent capacity.

Drought returned in the early 2020s, and Medina Lake's capacity had fallen to about 2.3 percent by March 2025, again squeezing the lake economy Lakehills depends on.

Although it has a Hill Country setting, Lakehills is part of the San Antonio metropolitan statistical area.