Corpus Christi, Texas map

The city occupies the elbow of the Texas coast where the shoreline turns from east–west to north–south, which is why the surrounding area is called the Coastal Bend. It is 143 miles southeast of San Antonio down I-37, about 210 miles southwest of Houston, and 160 miles north of Brownsville on US-77. The Nueces River reaches the sea here through Nueces Bay on the northwest side, and gives Nueces County its name.

Downtown stands on a low bluff above the bayfront seawall; almost everything else is flat and barely above sea level. Spanish charts named the bay for the feast of Corpus Christi, and the modern town dates to Henry Kinney's 1839 trading post. Three water bodies define the map: Corpus Christi Bay in front of the city, Nueces Bay behind it to the northwest, and the Laguna Madre, the long shallow lagoon between the mainland and Padre Island.

The Corpus Christi Ship Channel runs west from the bay between the city and the industrial north shore, lined with refineries, grain elevators and crude-oil docks and continuing inland to the Inner Harbor and Tule Lake. US-181 crosses it on the Harbor Bridge, the steel arch opened in 1959 that separates downtown from North Beach; a taller cable-stayed replacement has been built alongside it to give bigger tankers clearance. West of the bridge, the Joe Fulton corridor serves the port's industrial docks, and the La Quinta channel across the bay serves San Patricio County.

Naval Air Station Corpus Christi occupies the Flour Bluff peninsula on the southeast side of the bay, where the Navy trains primary flight students and the Corpus Christi Army Depot overhauls helicopters. Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi has its own island, Ward Island, in Oso Bay just west of the base. Corpus Christi International Airport is on the west side of the city off SH-44, and the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station keeps its own runways on the peninsula.