What Eureka Springs is known for

Eureka Springs is a remote Ozark town of barely 2,000 people, built on healing water and rebuilt on the refusal to tear itself down. It preserved its entire winding Victorian downtown, and boosters later added a roughly 65 foot Christ of the Ozarks statue and a religious spectacle, The Great Passion Play. Eureka Springs and Carroll County now host more than 750,000 visitors a year.

A cure that ran out

Eureka Springs was founded in 1879 on the promise of healing water, drawing the sick and hopeful by the thousands during the mineral cure craze. Then medicine moved on and the healing water business collapsed. A remote hill town with no interstate faced slow emptying and irrelevance.

It had to find a new draw after the miracle that built it expired. The fate of every spa town whose cure runs out is to fade, and Eureka Springs had no obvious replacement.

Preserving the whole town

Rather than tear down and rebuild, the town preserved its entire winding Victorian downtown. The whole district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, making Eureka Springs one of few American cities listed nearly in its entirety. Then boosters added the roughly 65 foot Christ of the Ozarks statue, completed in 1966, and The Great Passion Play, which opened in 1968.

What preservation earns

Eureka Springs and Carroll County now host more than 750,000 visitors a year, roughly 360 for every resident, supporting over 2,600 tourism jobs. Visitors spend an average of $216 per trip.

Why it worked

The draw was built and defended, not inherited. Ozark scenery is common, but an entire intact Victorian city staged against the hills, paired with a religious spectacle no neighbor could replicate, is not. Eureka Springs preserved itself whole and grew into an artist colony and pilgrimage site at once, holding that identity for decades while comparable spa towns disappeared. Preservation plus spectacle rebuilt a destination where the water had left decline.