Abstract: Water ecological civilization is the basic guarantee of ecological civilization. Understanding of the spatial pattern and convergence of water ecological civilization advancement level is supportive to the comprehensive and coordinated construction of water ecological civilization. Taking the Huaihe River Eco-economic Belt as the research area, a comprehensive evaluation index system consisting of seven dimensions of water security, water ecology, water environment, water conservation, water supervision, water culture and water facilities was constructed. The entropy method comprehensive evaluation model was used to evaluate the water ecological civilization development level from 2006 to 2020. The framework system of exploratory spatio-temporal data analysis (ESTDA) was introduced to analyze the spatial pattern of the development level of water ecological civilization and the dynamic evolution of spatio-temporal dependence from the perspective of spatio-temporal interaction. The spatial panel econometric model was compared and further selected to conduct an empirical analysis on the convergence of the development level of water ecological civilization. This study found that: (1) During the survey period, the construction of water ecological civilization in the study area achieved remarkable results. In particular, the development level was doubled after 2013. However, water ecology, water culture and water supervision were still in the low levels. The characteristics of spatial distribution evolved from "high low medium" dumbbell type distribution in 2006 to "high medium low" ladder type distribution in 2020, and spatial path locking and transition coexisted. (2) The development level of water ecological civilization had significant spatial autocorrelation characteristics. The relative length of the LISA time path was larger in the east than in the west. 84% of the cities had low curvature of the LISA time path, lacked coordination and integration in the moving direction, and had transition inertia. The local spatial correlation pattern was relatively stable. (3) σ Convergence did not exist in the construction of water ecological civilization, but there existed significant absolute value β convergence and conditional β convergence, and moreover, the conditional β convergence was much faster. (4) The convergence of local urban water ecological civilization development was significantly affected by economic development level, urbanization and the negative spatial spillover effect of neighboring cities as well.