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The Lone Star Flight Museum is an aviation museum at Ellington Airport in southeast Houston. Founded in 1985 from a private collection, it moved here from Galveston in 2017 after Hurricane Ike flooded its old hangars. Two hangars show more than 20 historic aircraft, mostly from the Second World War era, together with exhibits on the history of flight.

The Downtown Aquarium is an aquarium and restaurant complex on Bagby Street in downtown Houston, opened by Landry's in 2003 on the site of the old Fire Station No. 1 and Central Waterworks. Its tanks hold more than 200 species in themed areas such as a Louisiana swamp, a sunken galleon and a rainforest, beside a white tiger habitat and a Ferris wheel.

Discovery Green is a 12-acre park in downtown Houston beside the George R. Brown Convention Center, built on former parking lots and opened in 2008 to a design by Hargreaves Associates. It has Kinder Lake, lawns, gardens, a playground, dog runs, two restaurants and stages for concerts and other public events held through the year.

Buffalo Bayou Park is a 160-acre city park stretching 2.3 miles along Buffalo Bayou just west of downtown Houston, between Allen Parkway and Memorial Drive. Reopened in 2015 after a renovation, it has trails, gardens, a skate park and the Cistern, a drinking-water reservoir from 1926 with 221 concrete columns, now used for tours and art installations.

The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational chapel in the Montrose neighbourhood of Houston, founded by John and Dominique de Menil and completed in 1971. Its octagonal brick interior holds fourteen dark paintings by Mark Rothko. In front stands Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk in a reflecting pool dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

Holocaust Museum Houston is a museum in Houston's Museum District, opened in 1996 and enlarged in 2019, that documents the Holocaust and other genocides. Its permanent galleries tell the history through survivors' testimony and objects, among them a railcar of the type used for deportations and the Danish rescue boat Hanne Frank. All exhibits are in English and Spanish.

Children's Museum Houston is a hands-on museum for children up to 12 and their families in the Museum District, founded in 1980. Its building on Binz Street, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, opened in 1992. Exhibits on science, engineering, money and the natural world are bilingual in English and Spanish.

The Menil Collection is an art museum in Houston's Montrose neighbourhood, built for the collection of John and Dominique de Menil. Its main building by Renzo Piano opened in 1987. The 30-acre campus also holds the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Drawing Institute and a Dan Flavin installation, with works from antiquity to modern art.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the Museum District, opened its first building, a neoclassical design by William Ward Watkin, in 1924, making it the oldest art museum in Texas. Its collection of nearly 80,000 works spans more than 5,000 years and is shown in the Law, Beck and Kinder buildings, with wings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and a sculpture garden.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a non-collecting museum in the Museum District, founded in 1948 to show the art of its own time. Since 1972 it has occupied a building by Gunnar Birkerts clad in corrugated steel, on Montrose Boulevard. Its two galleries host changing exhibitions of contemporary artists, together with talks and education programmes.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science, founded in 1909, has been on the northern edge of Hermann Park since its present building was completed in 1969. Four floors of halls cover dinosaurs and fossils, gems and minerals, energy and ancient cultures, and the complex also holds the Burke Baker Planetarium, the Cockrell Butterfly Center and a giant-screen theatre.

Hermann Park is a 445-acre public park at the southern end of Houston's Museum District, created on land left to the city by George H. Hermann in 1914. Around the Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Reflection Pool lie McGovern Lake, the Japanese Garden, the McGovern Centennial Gardens and the Houston Zoo, with a miniature railway and pedal boats.

The Houston Zoo is a 55-acre zoo inside Hermann Park, opened in 1922 with about 40 animals and run by the non-profit Houston Zoo Inc. since 2002. It keeps several thousand animals of more than 500 species, from elephants, giraffes and big cats to reptiles and birds, and takes part in conservation projects in Texas and abroad.

Lakewood Church is an evangelical megachurch in Houston's Greenway Plaza, founded by John and Dodie Osteen in 1959 and led by Joel and Victoria Osteen. Since 2005 it has met in the former Compaq Center, the arena where the Houston Rockets once played, rebuilt as a sanctuary of about 16,800 seats with services in English and Spanish.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is the presidential library of Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, on the University of Texas at Austin campus. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and dedicated in 1971, the ten-storey travertine building holds exhibits on his life and presidency and a seven-eighths-scale replica of the Oval Office.

The Blanton Museum of Art is the art museum of the University of Texas at Austin, with more than 22,000 works including modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings. Its gallery building opened in 2006, and the grounds include Austin, a stone building with coloured glass windows by Ellsworth Kelly, opened in 2018.

Lady Bird Lake is a reservoir on the Colorado River through central Austin, created in 1960 as a cooling pond for a city power plant and called Town Lake until 2007, when it was renamed after the former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. A hike-and-bike trail runs along its shores, and most motorboats are banned, so the water is used for kayaking, paddleboarding and rowing.

The Harry Ransom Center is the archive, library and museum of the University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1957 and in its present building since 1972. Its galleries show changing exhibitions drawn from manuscripts, rare books, photographs and art, and the lobby displays a Gutenberg Bible and Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving camera photograph.

The Bullock Texas State History Museum, north of the Capitol, opened in 2001 and presents Texas history over three floors. Exhibits run from a Gault-site projectile point, among the oldest human-made objects in the Americas, to ranching, oil and space flight, and include the hull of La Belle, the ship of the French explorer La Salle that sank off Texas in 1686.

The Neill-Cochran House Museum is a two-storey Greek Revival house in north-central Austin, built by the architect-builder Abner Cook in the mid-1850s with tall Doric columns across its front. It was the first home of the Texas school for the blind and a military hospital after the Civil War; visitors tour its rooms and a rear outbuilding believed to be former slave quarters.