Cameron County Texas map
26.10° N · 97.48° W · County seat: Brownsville · 1,280 sq mi
Cameron County is the southernmost county in Texas, the only one that touches both the Rio Grande and the Gulf, and 388 of its 1,280 square miles are water — the Laguna Madre behind South Padre Island. Brownsville sits at the corner where the river meets the coast, and the beach at Boca Chica, 22 miles east of it, is now the SpaceX launch site.
Brownsville is at the southern tip on the Rio Grande; Harlingen and San Benito sit inland to the north on I-69E. The long barrier island on the right of the map is Padre Island, with the Laguna Madre behind it.
Where Cameron County is
The county was organized in 1848 from Nueces County and the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande that Mexico ceded that year, and named for Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born soldier of the Texas Revolution who was executed in Mexico after the Mier expedition's black bean drawing.
It has only two Texas neighbours — Willacy County north and Hidalgo County west. The Rio Grande is the southern boundary, with Matamoros, Tamaulipas, immediately across from Brownsville, and the Gulf is the eastern one. McAllen is 47 miles west along I-2, Edinburg 45 miles northwest and Corpus Christi about 160 miles north by road on I-69E and US-77.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Brownsville (county seat) | City | 186,738 |
| Harlingen | City | 71,829 |
| San Benito | City | 24,865 |
| Los Fresnos | City | 8,152 |
| La Feria | City | 6,867 |
| Primera | Town | 5,252 |
| Port Isabel | City | 5,026 |
| Laguna Vista | Town | 3,526 |
| Combes | Town | 3,143 |
| Rancho Viejo | Town | 2,832 |
| Santa Rosa | Town | 2,462 |
| South Padre Island | Town | 2,076 |
| Rio Hondo | City | 2,030 |
| Palm Valley | City | 1,409 |
Starbase, at Boca Chica, incorporated in 2025 and is the county's newest municipality; its population is a few hundred, mostly SpaceX employees. Los Indios, Bayview and Indian Lake are small incorporated towns along the river and the lagoon.
Roads and crossings
- Interstate 69E / US-77 – the north–south route, running from Brownsville through Harlingen and Combes and out past Raymondville toward Kingsville and Corpus Christi.
- Interstate 2 / US-83 – the Valley's east–west freeway, beginning at Harlingen and running west through La Feria toward Weslaco, McAllen and Mission.
- Interstate 169 / SH-550 – a short freeway linking the Port of Brownsville and the Veterans bridge to I-69E, built for truck traffic.
- SH-100 – east from Los Fresnos through Laguna Vista and Port Isabel and across the causeway to South Padre Island.
- SH-4 – Boca Chica Boulevard, running 22 miles east from Brownsville past the Starbase site to the beach, where it ends at the Gulf.
- SH-48 – the shortcut between Brownsville and Port Isabel along the north side of the ship channel.
Four international bridges cross to Mexico. The Gateway International Bridge and the older B&M Bridge run from downtown Brownsville into Matamoros; the Veterans International Bridge at Los Tomates carries most of the commercial traffic on the east side; and the Free Trade Bridge at Los Indios, upriver to the west below San Benito, opened in 1992 to take trucks away from the city crossings.
The port and the ship channel
The Port of Brownsville is the only deep-water port directly on the United States–Mexico border. It sits at the inland end of the Brownsville Ship Channel, a roughly 17-mile cut running east to Brazos Santiago Pass between Padre Island and Brazos Island. Its main businesses are steel, petroleum products, wind-turbine components moving inland by truck, and ship-breaking: several yards on the channel dismantle retired naval and commercial vessels.
Boca Chica, on the south side of the pass, is where SpaceX built its Starship facility from 2014 onward — a factory, a launch complex and the company town of Starbase. Launches close SH-4 and Boca Chica Beach for the day, which is announced in advance by the county.
The island, the lagoon and the battlefield
South Padre Island is the county's beach town, reached from Port Isabel by the Queen Isabella Memorial Causeway — about 2.4 miles long, the longest bridge in Texas. Between the island and the mainland the Laguna Madre is one of only a handful of hypersaline lagoons in the world, shallow, salty and thick with seagrass, which is why the wintering redhead ducks and the fishing guides both concentrate there.
Inland, Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge covers a large block of coastal prairie, thorn scrub and lagoon shoreline north of Los Fresnos and is the best-known ocelot habitat left in the United States. On the north side of Brownsville, Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park preserves the ground where the first battle of the Mexican–American War was fought on 8 May 1846; the Resaca de la Palma battlefield of the following day is a separate unit inside the city.