Webb County Texas map
27.76° N · 99.34° W · County seat: Laredo · 3,375 sq mi
Webb County is the freight door of the United States. Four international bridges at Laredo move more cross-border trade than any other point on the Mexican border, and Interstate 35 starts here, at the river, and runs 1,568 miles north to Duluth. The county covers 3,375 square miles, sixth-largest in Texas, and 255,211 of its 267,114 people live in Laredo.
Laredo sits at the southwest corner, on the Rio Grande. I-35 runs north from the bridges toward Cotulla; US-83 follows the river downstream to Zapata; the eastern half of the county is brush country and gas wells.
Where Webb County is
The county was cut from Nueces County in 1848, in the first round of counties organized after the Rio Grande became the international line, and named for James Webb, who was in turn secretary of the treasury, secretary of state and attorney general of the Republic of Texas.
Its longest boundary is the Rio Grande, and across it lie three Mexican states — Coahuila upstream, Nuevo León in the middle and Tamaulipas at Nuevo Laredo. On the Texas side the neighbours run Dimmit and La Salle counties to the north, McMullen County northeast, Duval County east, Jim Hogg County southeast, Zapata County south and Maverick County at the northwest corner. San Antonio is about 150 miles northeast on I-35, Eagle Pass 120 miles northwest on US-83, and McAllen 145 miles southeast on US-83.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Laredo (county seat) | City | 255,205 |
| Rio Bravo | City | 4,573 |
| El Cenizo | City | 2,539 |
Rio Bravo and El Cenizo sit side by side on the river about 15 miles downstream from Laredo; both were colonias that incorporated in the late 1980s. Everything else in the county is unincorporated. The eastern settlements — Bruni, Mirando City, Oilton and Aguilares, strung along SH-359 — grew out of the Mirando oil field of the 1920s and now sit in the middle of the Eagle Ford and Lobo gas country.
Roads
- Interstate 35 – its southern terminus is at the Juárez–Lincoln Bridge in downtown Laredo. It runs north the length of the county past Laredo's east side and crosses into La Salle County toward Cotulla and San Antonio.
- Interstate 69W / US-59 – leaves Laredo northeast toward Freer and George West, the truck route to Corpus Christi and Houston.
- US-83 – enters from Zapata County along the river, runs through Laredo, then turns north for Catarina and Carrizo Springs in Dimmit County.
- SH-359 – east from Laredo through Aguilares and Bruni to Hebbronville in Jim Hogg County.
- SH-255 – the Camino Colombia toll road, 22 miles across empty ranchland linking the Colombia Solidarity Bridge to I-35 north of the city, so that trucks bypass Laredo entirely.
- Loop 20 – the Bob Bullock Loop, the eastern bypass tying the World Trade Bridge to US-59, SH-359 and US-83.
The bridges and the inland port
Laredo has four road crossings to Mexico, numbered 1 through 4 in local usage. Bridge 1, the Gateway to the Americas Bridge, is the downtown crossing for pedestrians and cars. Bridge 2, the Juárez–Lincoln, takes the I-35 traffic. Bridge 3, the Laredo–Colombia Solidarity Bridge, is 25 miles upriver to the northwest and lands not in Tamaulipas but in Colombia, Nuevo León. Bridge 4, the World Trade Bridge on the northwest side, is commercial trucks only and handles the bulk of the freight. A separate railroad bridge downtown carries the Canadian Pacific Kansas City main line into Nuevo Laredo.
Together these make Laredo the busiest land port in the United States by value of trade, which is why the county's employment is so heavily weighted toward customs brokerage, warehousing and trucking rather than the ranching that occupies most of its acreage.
Land and water
Only 14 of the county's 3,375 square miles are water, and there is no reservoir of consequence — Webb is one of the drier counties in South Texas, running to mesquite, blackbrush and prickly pear over caliche. Ranches here are measured in tens of thousands of acres, and the gas wells drilled through them since 2008 have been the main change to the landscape in a century.
Lake Casa Blanca International State Park sits on the northeast edge of Laredo beside Loop 20, on a reservoir built on Chacon Creek — the only public lake access in the county.