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On the evening of March 26, the museum is hosting Bug Bites, an event where people can sample chef-crafted dishes featuring a variety of insects. With a menu that includes coffee-blackened grasshopper street tacos, grilled scorpion with pineapple mojo, roasted orange-ant mole, and cricket carrot cake, bugs might just become a welcome addition to culinary classics.
Springtime calls for road trips to see Texas’ native wildflowers—bluebonnets, firewheels, and pink evening primroses, just to name a few. But other flowers bloom this time of year, too, and they’re celebrated in festive fashion in El Paso, Castroville, and Georgetown.
When Texas revolutionaries first cried “Remember the Alamo!” during their fight for independence from Mexico, little could they have known the resilience of their rallying cry.
Raul Gutierrez’s Western art reflects his experience in the borderlands.
Late artist and philanthropist Linda Pace’s vision puts the Alamo City on the modern art map
Starting this week, the San Antonio’s Day of the Dead festivities range from museum exhibitions to a Catrinas on the River Parade. “Considering the city’s history and diversity, it makes sense that San Antonio is the national destination to celebrate this holiday,” says Dawn Robinette of Day of the Dead San Antonio.
Down at the Southern tip of our state, Tex-Mex is more than just a food group—it’s an entire way of life. And here in one of our most vibrant border cities, the cultures of two countries blend together into one incredible day trip. (And yes, I’m considering Texas a country.) This town started with a “bang” and continues to excite everyone who visits.
At Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge south of Alamo, the Spanish moss dripping from the trees invokes a sense of tranquility—and a touch of otherworldliness—in a park created to protect migratory birds. While wandering the refuge’s 14 miles of trails, keep an eye and ear out for resident birds like green jays, chachalacas, and great kiskadees, which are joined by migratory species in the fall and spring.
Located at the intersection of Interstate 10 and US 77, Schulenburg may be best known as a reliable stop for a kolache fix. But with its roots in German and Czech settlement, this little town offers outsized cultural attractions, including spectacular painted churches, the Texas Polka Music Museum, and the Stanzel Model Aircraft Museum. Schulenburg was incorporated as a railroad town in 1875, and the arrival of a Carnation Milk condensing plant put the town on the map in 1929.
Though mesquite beans haven’t become a staple of modern American diets, they were a major food source for indigenous communities in the Southwest and Mexico for thousands of years. The beans are harvested summer through early fall.
If you didn’t start thinking about your summer plans in February, don’t fret.
A kermesse or kermes is a festival or bazaar hosted by a Catholic church to raise funds from summer through late fall.
A stroll through downtown Weslaco feels like a visit to a bygone era, when
department stores and hardware shops in Spanish colonial buildings lined the streets. Founded in 1919, Weslaco grew into a farming hub, famous as the home of the ruby red grapefruit and 1015 onion. The same mild climate that attracted farmers makes Weslaco a hotspot today for winter Texans—typically retirees from cold climates—and birders, who come to see Rio Grande Valley specialties like the green jay. When the town slows down in the summer, locals refresh with icy raspas and beach trips to nearby South Padre Island.
Whether you plan to spend Independence Day with a cookout, barbecue, or picnic, we’ve got crowd-pleasing recipes that are sure to keep your guests satisfied.
Featuring portraits of more than 100 people, “American Dream” was the idea of Jorge Cortez—the son of Mi Tierra founders Pedro “Pete” and Cruz Cortez. “I wanted to honor my father and mother, who came to the U.S. as immigrants,” Cortez says of the mural.
Texans are celebrating Juneteenth with events across the state this week, including today’s state government holiday.
Taking over 18,000-square-feet and two stories of Travis Park Plaza in the downtown area, Hopscotch features rooms that will house anything from light installations and adult playscapes to experimental architecture and gamified environments. It’s set to open late 2019/early 2020.
Diana Kennedy, widely considered to be the foremost authority on Mexican cooking, drove the 892 miles from her home in Michoacán, Mexico, to San Antonio in February (as chronicled by The New York Times) to drop off her collection of 19th-century Mexican cookbooks.
All beer has four main ingredients: grain, hops, yeast, and water. Southerleigh, a restaurant and brewery in San Antonio’s Pearl entertainment district, has crafted a limited-edition beer with all those ingredients sourced from Texas. Now that the craft beer movement is here to stay, it seems like locavore beer is the next wave.
From its opening in 1936 until the late ’50s, when the advent of air-conditioning moved the party to indoor venues, Sunken Garden made Shiner the swingingest small town in Texas. All the big Texas swing and polka bands, including Houston’s Blue Ridge Playboys, played here to capacity crowds of 500, according to the Lavaca County Historical Commission. But these days, dining, not dancing is the draw.
Landscape painter Gabriel Salazar has long been inspired by the lush fields of citrus and palms surrounding Donna. As a boy, with the help of his father’s American employer, Salazar immigrated to this Rio Grande Valley town from a small community near Monterrey,
Texas is awash in color after a wet fall and winter. These are some of our favorite photos readers have shared with us so far this year.
When Lindy Chambers drives along the backroads of her hometown of Bellville, she often pulls over to take photos of dilapidated trailer homes or to collect the detritus that many people would pass off as junk—later to be resurrected in her artwork. A self-taught oil painter and sculptor known for colorful depictions of country life, Chambers moved from Hockley to this historic seat of Austin County about 20 years ago.
Awed by the spectacular variety of wildflowers throughout Texas, we sent four photographers on a springtime mission across the state. They combed seven distinct regions of Texas, from the shaded forests of the Piney Woods to the mountains and deserts of the Big Bend, from sandy coastal dunes to rolling hills and the vast plains of the Panhandle. The results are as magnificent and diverse as the lands that nurture our abundant blossoms.
For our March 2019 issue, we sent photographer Larry Ditto to capture spring blooms in South Texas and the Gulf Coast. These are some of our favorite images that we didn’t have room for in the issue.
Texas Folklife’s annual contest seeks young players in the genres of conjunto, zydeco, Cajun, and polka. You’re sure to encounter a few in the halls of any Texas high school: shaggy-haired teens with rock ‘n’ roll dreams, a guitar case or drum sticks in hand. But an accordion? Those might be a little harder to find.
The business loop of US 77 running through Harlingen is called Sunshine Strip, and the name couldn’t be more accurate. Harlingen boasts February highs of around 73 degrees and an average of only three days of rain for the entire month. For decades, snowbirds from across the United States and Canada have made the city a winter home; the airport even has seasonal direct flights from Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver.
For a sneak peek of up-and-coming culinary talent, make plans to visit Savor in San Antonio.
The restaurant opened Jan. 22 inside the Texas campus of the Culinary Institute of America at the Pearl entertainment district. Led by professional instructors, students working toward associate degrees prepare and serve local and seasonal, “modern American” food that draws from various cultures they’ve studied, from Asian to European cuisine.
Dust off your favorite pair of cowboy boots because the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo is back Feb. 7-24. The event, which was established in 1949 and brings 2 million visitors to the AT&T Center every year, has released a live music lineup packed with country music stars and other national entertainers.
There was a time when going home for the holidays meant taking the train. Whether boarding a steam locomotive or the electric interurban, passengers who could afford a ticket enjoyed unheard-of advantages in speed and comfort over horse-drawn coaches and the earliest automobiles.
Remember Goliad? It’s one of the oldest towns in Texas, originating in 1749 as a Spanish colonial mission and presidio where the San Antonio River flows through gently rolling coastal plains a little more than 45 miles inland from San Antonio Bay.
The Texas badlands east of the Pecos River and along the state’s border with Mexico bristle in thorn-covered plateaus and jagged limestone canyons. But after spring rains, the country often reveals a softer side, blushing with Texas sage blooms. The sage grows on both sides of the Rio Grande, clinging to crevices, thriving among the flats, and populating the rocky shores of Amistad Reservoir, home to Amistad National Recreation Area and ground zero for the most important shared resource in badlands territory—water.
After U-turns on the edges of grapefruit groves, repeated pullovers to study our Rio Grande Valley street guide, and a precarious three-point turn on the narrow levee road where a border patrol truck blocks our path, we are really lost. Like so many wanderers before us, we are searching for La Lomita Mission, which a local history buff named Frank told me about at an Edinburg bar the night before. “Just travel the Old Military Highway that goes along the Rio Grande,” Frank said. What Frank didn’t say was that Military Highway, much like the river it runs along, is a trickster that stops, starts, and twists in unexpected ways.
When you’re known as “the birthplace of Texas freedom,” you have a lot to live up to. Gonzales doesn’t disappoint, celebrating its past like Austin does its live music scene. This town of 7,628 has the only state-designated Texas History Museum District, plus there’s a Pioneer Village of cabins, blacksmith shops, a barn, a church, and a smokehouse that embodies the 1800s. A few miles outside of town, a monument marks the site of the battlefield where the first shots of the Texas Revolution were fired in 1835. The actual cannon is on display at the Gonzales Memorial Museum; flags depicting it with the defiant “Come and Take It!” slogan, which taunted Mexican troops, are omnipresent reminders that Gonzales might as well be nicknamed the “Live Texas History Capital of the World.”
Early one morning on Trinity Bay, the autumn sky began to glisten. Myriad monarchs unfurled in clouds from the shoreline, fluttering overhead, some landing on our boat, on our fishing rods, and even on me and my husband. We watched, enchanted, as they danced ever-southward, propelled by a light north wind and their biological imperative.
Perched on a dusty ridge overlooking the Rio Grande, the tiny town of Langtry lies in the thick of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, about 60 miles west of Del Rio. Langtry sprang up in 1882 as a railroad camp during the construction of the Southern Pacific line. Among the profiteers following the railroad was Roy Bean, a tent-saloon operator who became Langtry’s justice of the peace.
Texas is vast, and the decisions are wide open when hunger strikes on those long hauls across the state. Sure, you could pull up to the nearest drive-thru window (again), but there’s nothing boldest or grandest about a bag of fast food—especially when exceptional mom-and-pop restaurants are dishing up affordable comfort a little farther down the line. Whether you’re hankering for a taste of home or the meal less traveled, sometimes you just need to get out of the car and into a diner booth.
My kids know I’m happy to travel for a meal, particularly when huevos are involved, but in their minds, this was pushing it. The night before, we’d driven more than three hours across the dark, South Texas landscape to Kingsville. Now, on a Saturday morning, they were back in the car just before dawn. “But look at the light, it’s beautiful!” I told them, pointing to the horizon. “Besides, this is not just any breakfast,” I promised. “It’s a chance to experience Texas history on one of the most famous ranches in the world.”
In broad daylight, the Silver Slipper is hardly a looker. The compact building 4 miles northeast of downtown Houston is about as long and wide as an eight-lane bowling alley—“indistinct Minimal Traditional,” according to The Handbook of Texas. Three days a week, it’s a bar, short-order eatery, and neighborhood hangout.
Saturday nights, however, the Silver Slipper transforms into something else.
Texas begins in Laredo at mile marker 1 of I-35. Laredo’s warm weather creates a relaxing ambiance.
San Antonio, the riverwalk, satx
The freight courier and ox-drawn cart in the entryway of the new Robert J. and Helen C.
When we first reported on the redevelopment of San Antonio’s former Pearl Brewery site in 2010, the 22-acre complex-at the northernmost navigable point of the San Antonio River-was beginning to fill in with shops, restaurants, and activities ranging from a weekly farmer’s market to cooking classes at the new Texas campus of the Culinary Institute of America.
When I travel, I enjoy interacting with the locals as much as with fellow visitors, so I’m excited about the River Walk’s latest expansion.
It’s a chilly Saturday morning in December, and a line 300-people long has formed across the street from the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Published 10 times per year by the Texas Department of Transportation, Texas Highways, the official travel magazine of Texas, encourages travel to and within the Lone Star State and tells the Texas story to readers around the world.
